This is my Real Life Story: Troubled Galaxy Destroyed Dreams. It is hightime that I should share my life with you all. So that something may be done to save this Galaxy. Please write to:
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This Blog is all about Black Untouchables,Indigenous, Aboriginal People worldwide, Refugees, Persecuted nationalities, Minorities and golbal RESISTANCE.

Thursday, December 25, 2008

DEMOCRACY Killed Once Again as Military hegemony of Pakistan and Indian Brahaminical Rulers Compete to CREATE WAR in US Interest Only!The IAF has earmarked 5,000 targets in Pakistan!Satyam demands apology from WB! Is it our India Incs REAL Character? Dodging? Christmas mass passes off peacefully in Kandhamal!

What PSYCHE do we feel within? Clearly it happens to be the REVENGE PSYCHE after all! Thus, 'Ghajini' gets bumper opening worldwide! Every one amongst us behaves like the HAMLET seeking revenge in Hallucination! Amir Khan presents a MOMENTO classic as the perfect recipe for WAR MANIA representing Most Violent REVENGE only and DELETING the Hamlet DILEMMA of TO BE OR NOT TO BE. It is only YA!

It was ARYAN CHIEFTAIN INDRA who destroyed MOHANJODORO AND HARRAPA the URBAN civilisation and declared himself PURANDAR, the Brave who conquered Big CITIES apparently Mohanjodoro and Harappa!

George Bush did the same TREATMENT as far as BAGHDAD and BASRA are concerned! President BUSH is the Post Modern INDRA, and the Aryan ZIONIST BRAHMINS worship him as GOD OMNIPRESENT OMNIPOWER!

How the BRHAMINICAL Hegemony sustains itself? Look, here you are! The Aboriginal indigenous leadership of SC, ST, OBC and Minorities are also the parts of the Brahaminical hegemony as they have adopted the Political Culture of the Brahmins as they target to get personal Mileage in spite of the LIBERATION OF the BLACK Untouchables in this part of the world. This leadership is amazingly SILENT against War against Terrorism, Corporate Imperialism , Fascism and blnd nationalism! Thus most essential genuine Anti Imperialist Anti fascist, more precisely Anti US, Anti Capitalist movement in this part of the galaxy happens to be ABSENT for ever. Although the Zionist Brahmin White GALAXY ORDER of Post Modern MANUSMRITI and APARTHEID would everyone of us as they DELETED Indus valley Civilization, Palestine, Mesopotamia and the ancient Civilisation of EGYPT! The social activist have to mould themselves as not only Eco activists but they have to launch a WORLD PEACE Campaign to RESIST Corporate Imperialism as well as Fascism worldwide! Being mainstream our people lost the initiative thousands years ago. Our Indigenous Aboriginal people never wanted WAR. We always remained PEACE LOVING People. But the ARYANS demonised us and enslaved us adopting and manipulating our legacy of Knowledge in every sphere of life. They imposed their Culture and religion upon our Ancestors. Now they have imposed their Politics on us and our leaders adoted that CORRUPT ADULTERY without any Hesitation!

Troubled Galaxy Destroyed Dreams: Chapter 132

Palash Biswas

Dravidians and Nagas are one and the same peopleWho are the Dravidians? Are they different from the Nagas? Or are they two different names for a people of the same race? It is a fact that the term Dravidians and Nagas are merely two different names for the same people. It is not to be denied that very few will be prepared to admit the proposition that the Dravidians and Nagas are merely two different names for the same people and fewer that the Dravidians as Nagas occupied not merely South India but that they occupied the whole of India—South as well as North. Nonetheless these are historical truths.

Nagas and Dravidians are one and the same people. Even with this much of proof, people may not be found ready to accept the thesis. The chief difficulty in the way of accepting it lies in the designation of the people of South India by the name Dravidian. It is natural for them to ask why the term Dravidian has come to be restricted to the people of South India if they are really Nagas. Critics are bound to ask: If the Dravidians and the Nagas are the same people, why is the name Nagas not used to designate people of South India also………….

The word ‘Dravida’ is not an original word. It is the sanskritized form of the word ‘Tamil’. The original word ‘Tamil’ when imported into Sanskrit became ‘Damilla’ and later on ‘Damita’ became Dravida. The word Dravida is the name of the language of the people and does not denote the race of the people. The third thing to remember is that Tamil or Dravida was not merely the language of South India but before the Aryans came it was the language of the whole of India, and was spoken from Kashmir to Cape Comorin. In fact, it was the language of the Nagas throughout India. The next thing to note is the contact between the Aryans and the Nagas and the effect it produced on the Nagas and their language.

Strange as it may appear the effect of this contact on the Nagas of North India was quite different from the effect it produced on the Nagas of South India. The Nagas in North India gave up Tamil which was their mother tongue and adopted Sanskrit in its place. The Nagas in South India retained Tamil as their mother tongue and did not adopt Sanskrit the language of the Aryans. If this difference is borne in mind it will help to explain why the name Dravida came to be applied only for the people of South India. The necessity for the application of the name Dravida to the Nagas of Northern India had ceased because they had ceased to speak the Dravida language. But so far as the Nagas of South India are concerned not only the propriety of calling them Dravida had remained in view of their adherence to the Dravida language but the necessity of calling them Dravida had become very urgent in view of their being the only people speaking the Dravida language after the Nagas of North had ceased to use it. This is the real reason why the people of South India have come to be called Dravidians.

The special application of the word Dravida for the people of South India must not, therefore, obscure the fact that the Nagas and Dravidas are the one and the same people. They are only two different names for the same people. Nagas was a racial or cultural name and Dravida was their linguistic name. Thus the Dasas are the same as the Nagas and the Nagas are the same as the Dravidians. In other words what we can say about the races of India is that there have been at the most only two races in the field, the Aryans and the Nagas.

Dr.B.R.Ambedkar

Pak will deal sternly with Indian surgical strikes: Qureshi

25 Dec 2008, 2315 hrs IST, PTIISLAMABAD: India should not make the "mistake" of carrying out surgical strikes against Pakistan as such an action would provoke a strong response, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said on Thursday.

Pakistan did not want war but is ready to defend its frontiers, Qureshi told reporters in his hometown of Multan. If India made the "mistake of carrying out a surgical strike", Pakistan will deal sternly with such an eventuality, he said.

"We will be compelled to respond if it happens," he said.

Asked if the possibility of war could be ruled out amidst escalating tensions in the wake of the Mumbai terror attacks, Qureshi said: "If you are asking me, I am not ruling out anything. But if war is imposed, we will respond to it like a brave and self-respecting nation."

He added: "I want to give a message to India that we are the torch-bearers of peace and remain committed to our desire for peace...Contrary to our reasonable, cooperative and non-aggressive attitude, some elements from India are issuing provocative statements."

Regional tensions have escalated after India blamed Pakistan-based elements for the Mumbai terror attacks that killed over 180 people. India has asked for action against these elements, but Pakistan has been insisting that it needs evidence from India to take forward its investigation into the incident.

Qureshi said Pakistan condemns terrorism and wants to expose those involved in such activities. It has already promised cooperation to India in this regard, he said.

"We will not resort to provocation while remaining committed to cooperation but at the same time, we will not tolerate any pressure," he remarked. Pakistan, he said, should "hope for the best but be prepared for the worst".

The country and the armed forces are vigilant and keeping a close watch on developments. "The situation keeps changing and we will prepare a strategy after examining any change," Qureshi underlined. "We are continuously monitoring the situation on the ground and in the air. Our air force and armed forces are on alert."

Meanwhile, presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar said "some elements in both India and Pakistan" did not want peace between the two neighbours.

"As Pakistan-India relations were improving...Mumbai happened. There are elements on both sides who not want Pakistan-India relations to improve. The Mumbai incident has occurred at that very moment when relations were not only improving but I think a strategic advancement was being made," he told Dawn News channel.

The two countries now have to decide whether the Mumbai incident "should be allowed to derail the peace process or be viewed as an obvious challenge to the process".

He added: "The government of Pakistan is determined that the Mumbai incident should not be allowed to derail the peace process and this is what we also urge the Indian government."PTI

Heightened activity across border, but BSF chief says no need to worrySudhi Ranjan SenThursday, December 25, 2008, (New Delhi)There has been an increase in Pakistan Army activity across the border but there's no need to panic, the BSF Director General M L Kumawat told NDTV on Thursday.

According to sources, the Karachi based 5 Corp is conducting war games on the Gujarat-Rajasthan border.

There is no new troop deployment on the border or LoC and it's not known whether the exercises were scheduled earlier or are in response to the situation.

Heightened movement across the border

Extra deployment of rangers in Pakistan, but not unusual

Border villages not being evacuated

Ground reality

Currently Pakistan has about one lakh twenty thousand troops on its eastern border with India. The Karachi based 5 Corp is conducting war games on the Gujarat-Rajasthan border.

After the ceasefire with India in 2003, Pakistan was able to move troops to its western border with Afghanistan.

It currently has about one and a half lakh troops along its 2,400 km long border. Just to put it in perspective. The distance from Delhi to Chennai is less than that about 2000 km. As many as 15 Infantry Brigades - roughly 38,000 troops - were moved to Waziristan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) last year. Pakistan Army is not experienced enough in CI operations and is also a reluctant fighter on its western border.

Peace pacts increase militancy

FATA -- Islamabad has historically held limited power over the semiautonomous tribal region made up of seven agencies of various Pashtun tribes. After the US attacked Afghanistan the Taliban and Al-Qaida moved to operate from this region.

There are about 80,000 troops here and they have suffered heavy casualties. Under President Pervez Musharraf several peace pacts were reached with tribal leaders. Analysts say that has been a virtual surrender of government power and increased militancy.

Militants threatened PeshawarPakistani military efforts to control extremism in the tribal areas has had an unintended consequence of causing the violence to seep into the bordering North West Frontier Province.

This area also harbours Al-Qaida and Taliban supporters and suicide attacks are on the rise. In June 2008, Pakistan's paramilitary forces led an offensive in the outskirts of Peshawar to push back militants threatening the provincial capital.

Attacks linked to insurgency

Pakistani military presence is also required in Baluchistan because of an internal insurgency. Pakistan often accuses India of being involved from Afghanistan in stoking the fire. The Baluch nationalist movement has reemerged in recent years with demands for a greater share of royalties for gas shipped to neighboring states. In 2006, a Pakistani strike killed Baluch nationalist leader Nawab Akbar Bugti setting off protests and failing to halt a simmering insurgency.

So, Pakistan military presence is twofold, Americans don't want any movement of Pakistani troops away from here because it will expose their forces in Afghanistan further.http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20080077772&ch=12/25/2008%209:57:00%20PM

Pak in war frenzy; intensifies troop movement

Zeenews Bureau

Lahore, Dec 25: In a move which could heighten tension between New Delhi and Islamabad, Pakistan has purportedly moved its tenth brigade to Lahore and ordered its third Armed Brigade to march towards Jhelum.

Islamabad has also reportedly put its 10th and 11th divisions on high alert. Unconfirmed reports have said militants have also been stationed alongwith the Army at the said locations.

Also Pakistan's Army has reportedly stationed its troops in the Rajouri and Poonch sectors of J&K.

Pakistan’s troop build up along the Indian border has also given credence to the current war hysteria between the two nuclear powered states.

The move comes a day after Pakistan deployed its Army in place of the regular Pak Rangers along its border with India.

Confirming the news, Additional Director general of BSF, Barmer, UK Bansal said, “There is a lot of activity along at the Pakistan side of India-Pakistan border near Barmer in Rajasthan and Pakistan Rangers have been replaced by the Pakistan Army.”

The ADG also added that BSF is on full alert and is capable of handling any eventuality.

The deployment is an indication of the level of apprehension on the Pakistani side on an Indian attack. It should be noted that the last time Pakistan Rangers were replaced by Army during the Kargil war.

The State government of Rajasthan has ordered the residents of border villages to be prepared for relocation. According to sources, the order came after a meeting of state Director General of Police and Home Secretary with official of the Central government.

This move came just a day after Pakistan Army Chief General Asfaq Kiyani warned India of a befitting reply in the wake of an Indo-Pak war.

The troops build up by Pakistan could also be seen as a tactic to send a message to the US administration that any tension along its eastern border could jeopardize Pentagon’s anti-Taliban operations in the western sector of the country.

Also, this is among various steps by Islamabad to tick India of its war preparedness in the wake of a war.

Diplomatic relations have gone into a tailspin between the two countries in the aftermath of a deadly terror attack on India’s financial capital Mumbai, believed to have been perpetrated by Pakistan based terrorists.

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari had on Wednesday vowed to defend the country ‘until the last breath’, and said no compromise would be made with the nation’s sovereignty.

Meanwhile, after reports of a possible Indian attack on Pakistan, the Pakistan Air Force continued its state of high alert and started aerial surveillance of the Chashma power plant and other sensitive sites.

There were reports of the fighter jets continuing aerial surveillance over the Chashma nuclear power plant and other sensitive sites.

Pakistan had put its airbases on high alert amidst fears of Indian ‘surgical strikes’ in the wake of Mumbai terror attacks.http://www.zeenews.com/nation/2008-12-25/493778news.html

Emergence Day has come and gone, but that doesn’t mean Gears of War mania has slowed down!

DEMOCRACY Killed Once Again as Military hegemony of Pakistan and Indian Brahaminical Rulers Compete to CREATE WAR in US Interest Only!

What PSYCHE do we feel within? Clearly it happens to be the REVENGE PSYCHE after all! Thus, 'Ghajini' gets bumper opening worldwide! Every one amongst us behaves like the HAMLET seeking revenge in Hallucination! Amir Khan presents a MOMENTO classic as the perfect recipe for WAR MANIA representing Most Violent REVENGE only and DELETING the Hamlet DILEMMA of TO BE OR NOT TO BE. It is only YA!Bollywood actor and filmmaker Aamir Khan's much awaited film 'Ghajini', the story of a man with short term memory loss on a mission to avenge the death of his fiancee, opened to a "bumper" response in India and 22 countries worldwide. The three hour and four minute long film, written and directed by A R Murugadoss, is the remake of a 2005 Tamil film by the same name starring actors Asin and Surya in the lead. The film was also dubbed in Telugu.

The IAF has earmarked 5,000 targets in Pakistan! daily telegraph reports. on the other hand,Military Hegemony in Pakistan contradicts every statement of the Political leadership pronouncing peace. Meanwhile, entire WEST led by United States of America STIMULATES the WAR MANIA across the Political borders of this divided bleeding Geopolitics! It is GOOD XMASS Shopping Festival in Western Zionist Weapon Market, of course!

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s elected representatives on Wednesday rallied against India for what they dubbed as its “hostile propaganda,” and sought to turn the tables with the accusation that “terror networks” operating in Indian territory were attempting to destabilise the region.

The National Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution condemning the Mumbai attacks. But it asked the international community “to ensure that India also dismantles its terror networks affecting peace in the region and stop[s] regional destabilisation moves.”

Satyam demands apology from WB! Is it our india INcs real character? Dodging?Days after the World Bank announced that it had debarred for eight years Satyam Computer Services from doing any business with it, the IT major has demanded an apology from the Bretton Woods-twin for making ‘inappropriate’ statements.Demanding that the World Bank immediately withdraw its statements, Satyam Computer wanted ‘it (World Bank) to issue a new statement apologising to Satyam for the harm done to the company due to the Bank's actions and that it provide Satyam with a full explanation of the circumstances related to the Bank's inappropriate statements.’

Indian Media continue to FLASH SCREAMING News Breaks and headlines, Scrolls on WAR as the Corporate World Galaxy wide, the MNCS and the Ruling Class want nothing less than War against Pakistan. Contrarily, Media in Pakistan shows some glimpses of WISDOM as The Pakistani media on Thursday welcomed Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's declaration that there was 'no question of war', as one top analyst underlined that it is encouraging that Islamabad and New Delhi are keeping diplomatic channels open. But it may not sustain due to the MISCHIEVOUS MYSTERIOUS Behavior of the Political leadership! AS Gilani claims Pakistan wants ‘excellent’ relations with India even as he asked the international community to persuade New Delhi to defuse the current tensions!On the other hand, Pakistan has deployed more troops across the international border with Rajasthan in the wake escalation of tension between the two countries, BSF officials said.

"A lot of military movement is being noticed in districts just across the international border for the last few days, which is not normal," R C Dhyani, DIG of Rajasthan frontier BSF, said.

"Patrolling across the border has intesified while defence personnel are constantly on vigil from watch towers," he said.

"It was not a normal practice some days ago and after escalation of tension between two countries Pakistan has deployed more troops across border," he added.

Dhyani said though the situation is under control BSF is prepared to meet any eventuality.

ADG of BSF U K Bansal visited the border areas in Barmer, Jaisalmer and Jodhpur districts on Wednesday and he is understood to have noticed that the movement of troops across the border has intensified.

The first conclave of all the Indian envoys, held in the backdrop of Mumbai attacks, ended here today with the message of the top political leadership to present New Delhi's case effectively amid the new chill in relations with Pakistan.

The three-day conclave of over 120 Indian Ambassadors and High Commissioners, addressed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and several other Cabinet ministers, deliberated on ways to build pressure on Pakistan to ensure it ends terrorism emanating from its soil.

The Prime Minister told the conference that India saw the terror strikes in Mumbai as an "attack on India's ambitions to become an economic power", a message that the envoys are expected to highlight in their host countries.

In an oblique reference to Pakistan, Singh said "non-state actors were practicing terrorism, aided and abetted by state establishments".

He asked the envoys to gear up their diplomatic efforts to underline that India was destined to become a major economic and knowledge power.

The tone for the conference was set by External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee, who described the terror infrastructure in Pakistan as the "greatest danger" to the entire civilised world and wanted the global community to do more in making Islamabad act against the scourge.

Besides being addressed by the Prime Minister and Mukherjee, the envoys also interacted with President Pratibha Patil and Vice President Hamid Ansari.

Christmas mass passes off peacefully in KandhamalBhubaneswar (IANS): Midnight Christmas mass was attended by thousands of Christians amid tight security across Orissa, including Kandhamal district that had witnessed widespread anti-Christian violence earlier this year. In many places Hindus joined Christians in the celebrations, officials said Thursday.

"We have not received information of any trouble. It seems to be all peaceful," the Archbishop of Cuttack and Bhubaneswar Raphael Cheenath told IANS.

"We held the Christmas mass with prayer and singing," Cheenath said, adding that he is satisfied with the security arrangements made by the government.

"We are confident the Christmas celebrations will also pass off peacefully in the state," Cheenath said.

Officials said except for the felling of two trees on the road in two places early Thursday no untoward incident was reported. The trees were promptly removed by security forces.

"There has been no problem so far," Kandhamal district collector Krishan Kumar told IANS by phone.

About 8,000 people still living in government-run relief camps in the district also attended the Christmas mass and decorated their camps, officials said.

Kandhamal district, about 200 km from here, witnessed widespread anti-Christian violence after the murder of Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati and four of his aides Aug 23. At least 38 people were killed in the state and thousands of Christians forced to flee their homes after their houses were attacked by mobs. Extremist Hindu groups charged Christians with the murders, a charge repeatedly denied by Christian groups.

Pak goods cross LoC into India despite tensionJammu (PTI): For the first time after cross- border trade started in October, Pakistan traders on Thursday moved a truck-load of goods for their counterparts in Jammu and Kahsmir via Chakan-da-Bagh point, notwithstanding tension between the two countries over Mumbai terror attacks.

"Trader Mohammad Akber of Hajir in Pakistan has sent a truck load of 150 boxes of orange and 100 boxes of pomegranate besides 252 pairs of special Peshawari sandals to a business firm in Poonch," district officials here said.

They said that this was for the first time since October 21, when cross-border trade started through Poonch-Rawalkote road, traders across the borders have exchanged consignments.

The truck loaded with the consignment crossed Chakan- da-Bagh LoC point and arrived at Rangar International Trade Centre at Poonch, they said, adding it would be later handed over to the party in Poonch after checking.

The Indian firm had sent a consignment of 2200 kg of tomatoes on December 23 as demanded by the Pak trader, officials said.PTI

800 militants, including 300 foreigners still operating in J-KSrinagar (PTI): Despite significant improvement in the security situation in Jammu and Kashmir, at least 800 militants, including 300 foreigners, are still operating in the state, a top police official said.

"According to information from various agencies working on the ground, the number of militants operating in the state is around 800, including 300 foreigners," Director General of Jammu and Kashmir Police Kuldeep Khoda told reporters here.

Khoda said the security situation in the state has improved this year significantly as the number of militancy-related incidents has come down considerably.

"The militancy-related incidents have for the first time come below 1,000 and in fact less than 700 such incidents took place during the current year," he said.

Khoda said there has been a 40 per cent drop in militancy-related incidents this year as compared to 2007.

"Even the number of civilians killed in such incidents has come down from 164 in 2007 to 89 this year. It is for the first time that the civilian casualties have come down to double digits whereas in 1996, 1,413 civilians lost their lives in one year alone," he said.

CBI records statement of anti-Sikh riots witnessNew York (PTI): A key witness in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots deposed before a two-member CBI team, which recorded his statement here before it proceeded to San Francisco to take the testimony of another witness.

The CBI team recorded the statement of New York-based Jasbinder Singh, who claims to be a witness to the riots in the Indian capital that broke out in the wake of assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, an official said on condition of anonymity.

However, details of the interaction were not available.

After recording the statement of Jasbinder, the team left for San Francisco to meet California-based Jasbir Singh, another witness, who has alleged that former Union Minister Jagdish Tytler played a key role in instigating the rioters.

The investigators are expected to record Jasbir's statement either today or tomorrow, after which the team will leave for India, the official said.

The CBI team was sent to the US after Jasbir Singh repeatedly refused to appear before the Indian courts citing threat to his life and family.

Singh has alleged that former Union Minister Jagdish Tytler played a key role in instigating anti-Sikh rioters.

He has filed several affidavits against Tytler, an influential Congress leader of Delhi, before various Commissions, saying he was willing to testify before the court provided his and his family's safety was guaranteed.

CBI's move to visit the US marks a U-turn from its earlier position demanding the presence of Singh and other witnesses in India.

The agency, which had on Sept 29, 2007 filed an affidavit in a court seeking closure of case against Tytler on the plea that Singh was untraceable, was directed by court to submit the address of Singh, declared as a crucial witness.

Bill Clinton may be Hillary's special envoy for India, PakLondon (PTI): Former US President Bill Clinton may be Secretary of State-designate Hillary's special envoy for India and Pakistan even as she is believed to be forming a "hit squad" of diplomats for the world's troublespots. Hillary Clinton has suggested her husband Bill as an envoy for the Indian subcontinent, where the situation has turned volatile in the aftermath of the Mumbai mayhem, because of his troubleshooting experience, the 'Daily Mail' reported.

Bill Clinton had used several envoys during his two-term in office, with Richard Holbrooke the best-known for his key roles in brokering peace deals in the Middle East and the Balkans.

In fact, the diplomats, who will form the spearhead of the US State Department as Hillary Clinton takes office on January 20, would be sent to all the troubled places across the globe to try to prevent conflicts from breaking out. And, Holbrooke is among the names being mentioned as a possible envoy either for Afghanistan or Iran. The name of Martin Indyk, a former US Ambassador to Israel, is also doing rounds for a diplomatic post, the British newspaper said. Quoting insiders, it also said that Hillary Clinton, determined to wrestle power back from Pentagon which, under President George W Bush, played a dominant role in government, has dipped into her husband's former team for two advisers.

Jacob Lew, Budget Director in Clinton administration, has been given the job of ensuring that the State Department is not underfunded as Clinton wants extra money for diplomatic corps across the world.

And, James Steinberg, a former Deputy National Security Adviser to the former President, is also in her team as a trusted lieutenant.

Sixty-eight militants wanted by Pakistani authorities today surrendered in the northwestern Mohmand tribal region ahead of a deadline for them to lay down arms. The militants, belonging to the Haleemzai tribe, surrendered to the political administration, a statement issued by the paramilitary Frontier Corps said, adding 310 "hardcore militants" had surrendered in the past two weeks. Two top militant commanders have also turned themselves in to the political administration, the statement said. A large number of weapons were handed over to the authorities by the militants.

On the other hand,Pakistan will not act on the request for legal aid by Ajmal Amir Iman, the lone gunman captured for the Mumbai attacks, unless it is proved that he is a Pakistani national, Interior Ministry Chief Rehman Malik has said.

"There is no question of consular access unless it is proved that Ajmal Kasab is a Pakistan national," Malik said on the sidelines of a function at the headquarters of the National Database and Registration Authority.

"We have thoroughly checked the registration record but have not found Ajmal Kasab's name in the NADRA database," he said.

"Therefore we are not sure whether he is a Pakistani. How we can give him consular access without having knowledge about his nationality?"

How the BRHAMINICAL Hegemony sustains itself? Look, here you are! The Aboriginal indigenous leadership of SC, ST, OBC and Minorities are also the parts of the Brahaminical hegemony as they have adopted the Political Culture of the Brahmins as they target to get personal Mileage in spite of the LIBERATION OF the BLACK Untouchables in this part of the world. This leadership is amazingly SILENT against War against Terrorism, Corporate Imperialism , Fascism and blnd nationalism! Thus most essential genuine Anti Imperialist Anti fascist, more precisely Anti US, Anti Capitalist movement in this part of the galaxy happens to be ABSENT for ever. Although the Zionist Brahmin White GALAXY ORDER of Post Modern MANUSMRITI and APARTHEID would everyone of us as they DELETED Indus valley Civilization, Palestine, Messopotamia and the ancient Civilisation of EGYPT! The scoial activist have to mould themselves as not only Eco activists but they have to launch a WORLD PEACE Campaign to RESIST Corporate Imperialism as well as Fascism worldwide! Being mainstream our people lost the initiative thousands years ago. Our Indigenous Aboriginal people never wanted WAR. We alaways remained PEACE LOVING People. But the ARYANS demonised us and ensalved us adopting and manipulating our legacy of Knowledge in every sphere of life. They imposed their Culture and religion upon our Ancestors. Now they have imposed their Politics on us and our leaders adoted that CORRUPT ADULTERY without any Hesitation!

In several parts of the ancient India, more than 6000 years back, local customs and cultures developed in the practice of the religion. This is sometimes called the "Pre-Aryan" period of the History. Many of the Incarnations of Hidu Deities, according to the puranas, are referred to this period or an earlier period.Shiva and different MOTHER GODS including various incarnation of Kali and DURGA had been worshipped by the NON ARYANS in PRE ARYAN Period. All those aboriginal dieties, myths, legends. folklores, rituals and superstion our people related themselves to fertility, prosperity and peace. But the Arayans made a RUDRA of SHIVA cancelling his role of Peace. The incarnation of Goddess EARTH was made THE WAR GODDESS. ARYANS never used to offer prayers before any IDOL. They used the YAJNA and HOAM and SACRIFICE! Later they adopted the IDOLS and worshipping cultuer of the Non aryans to make them SLAVES. Agricultre and Civic life had been Non Aryan. Aryans just CPATURED. The Non Aryans practiced Mathemetics, Literature, Philosophy, Astrology and different disciplines of kowledge. Aryans enslaved our people with the rules of MANUSMIRITI and prohibited KNOWLEDGE for Black untouchables. They destroyed our legacy and History and marginalised us to BECOME MAINSTREAM AND RULING Hegemony for thousands and thousands years!

It was ARYAN CHIEFTAIN INDRA who destroyed MOHANJODORO AND HARRAPA the URBAN civilisation and declared himself PURANDAR, the Brave who conquered Big CITIES apparently Mohanjodoro and Harappa!This was the first urban civilization on the subcontinent, which was based on the agriculture and animal husbandry of the Indus flood-plain which appears to have been similar to that of recent centuries in the Indus valley.

George Bush did the same TRETMENT as far as BAGDAD and BASRA are concerned! President BUSH is the Post Modern INDRA, and the Aryan ZIONIST BRAHMINS worship him as GOD OMNIPRESENT OMNIPOWER!

Vedas are the foundation of the principles and practice of the faith at this time. At the same time, other texts also existed about various forms of worship. Religious teachings very much like the Vedas existed in every part of India and South Asia during the "Pre-Aryan" period itself. Sage Baadarayana (also popularly known as Sage Veda Vyasa or Vyasa Maharishi) organized the faiths and practice and codified the texts of Vedas. [He did not claim to have written them]. These texts were memorized and were recited in a particular way for generation after generation. This was the way the texts were well preserved for posterity, even though large parts the Vedas that are referred in the texts now, are not available and are lost forever.

Veda Vyasa who organized the Vedas also wrote the Vedantha Darsana and wrote all the eighteen Puranas and Upapuranas. Several types of Vedic rituals according to the teachings were performed as prescribed by the priests, along with the ritualistic worship to various Deities. In many communities, rituals, to images and natural forces and offerings to water and fire "Gods", were given precedence over the teachings of philosophy and ethics. Various religious beliefs and faiths that were present in the so called "Pre-Aryan India" in several parts of the land assimilated with the teachings of Vedas. Several village Deities were identified as the manifestations of the Impersonal Vedic God. Folklore stories of these village gods became Puranas later. The culture also accepted the various classes and varnas along with the teachings of Karma and Dharma. Over the course of time, people were concentrating on the rituals, worshipping various forms of Deities as the primary object of their religion and its very external aspects of the practice, with the hope of obtaining eternal salvation through rituals alone.

ATHARVA VEDA is believed to be written by the Non Aryans which reflect INDIAN Knowledge in every sphere of life! And it is the Materialist Analysis of History!

But the Ameriac Sponsered GLOBAL Hindutva dismisses existence of PRE ARYAN India as they dismiss our identities in Everyday life! They argue, this idea to be totally foreign to the history of India, whether north or south has become almost an unquestioned truth in the interpretation of ancient history Today, after nearly all the reasons for its supposed validity have been refuted, even major Western scholars are at last beginning to call it in question. The arguement continues as David Frawley wrote in his article entitled `The Myth of the Aryan Invasion of India’ :

The Indus valley culture was pronounced pre-Aryans for several reasons that were largely part of the cultural milieu of nineteenth century European thinking As scholars following Max Mullar had decided that the Aryans came into India around 1500 BC, since the Indus valley culture was earlier than this, they concluded that it had to be preAryan. Yet the rationale behind the late date for the Vedic culture given by Muller was totally speculative. Max Muller, like many of the Christian scholars of his era, believed in Biblical chronology. This placed the beginning of the world at 400 BC and the flood around 2500 BC. Assuming to those two dates, it became difficult to get the Aryans in India before 1500 BC.

Muller therefore assumed that the five layers of the four 'Vedas' & 'Upanishads' were each composed in 200 year periods before the Buddha at 500 BC. However, there are more changes of language in Vedic Sanskrit itself than there are in classical Sanskrit since Panini, also regarded as a figure of around 500 BC, or a period of 2500 years. Hence it is clear that each of these periods could have existed for any number of centuries and that the 200 year figure is totally arbitrary and is likely too short a figure.

It was assumed by these scholars many of whom were also Christian missionaries unsympathetic to the 'Vedas' that the Vedic culture was that of primitive nomads from Central Asia. Hence they could not have founded any urban culture like that of the Indus valley. The only basis for this was a rather questionable interpretation of the 'Rig Veda' that they made, ignoring the sophisticated nature of the culture presented within it.

Meanwhile, it was also pointed out that in the middle of the second millennium BC, a number of Indo-European invasions apparently occured in the Middle East, wherein Indo-European peoples the Hittites, Mit tani and Kassites conquered and ruled Mesopotamia for some centuries. An Aryan invasion of India would have been another version of this same movement of Indo-European peoples. On top of this, excavators of the Indus valley culture, like Wheeler, thought they found evidence of destruction of the culture by an outside invasion confirming this.

The Vedic culture was thus said to be that of primitive nomads who came out of Central Asia with their horse-drawn chariots and iron weapons and overthrew the cities of the more advanced Indus valley culture, with their superior battle tactics. It was pointed out that no horses, chariots or iron was discovered in Indus valley sites.

This was how the Aryan invasion theory formed and has remained since then. Though little has been discovered that confirms this theory, there has been much hesitancy to question it, much less to give it up.

Further excavations discovered horses not only in Indus Valley sites but also in pre-Indus sites. The use of the horse has thus been proven for the whole range of ancient Indian history. Evidence of the wheel, and an Indus seal showing a spoked wheel as used in chariots, has also been found, suggesting the usage of chariots.

Moreover, the whole idea of nomads with chariots has been challenged. Chariots are not the vehicles of nomads. Their usage occured only in ancient urban cultures with much flat land, of which the river plain of north India was the most suitable. Chariots are totally unsuitable for crossing mountains and deserts, as the so-called Aryan invasion required.

That the Vedic culture used iron & must hence date later than the introduction of iron around 1500 BC revolves around the meaning of the Vedic term "ayas", interpreted as iron. 'Ayas' in other Indo- European languages like Latin or German usually means copper, bronze or ore generally, not specially iron. There is no reason to insist that in such earlier Vedic times, 'ayas' meant iron, particularly since other metals are not mentioned in the 'Rig Veda' (except gold that is much more commonly referred to than ayas). Moreover, the 'Atharva Veda' and 'Yajur Veda' speak of different colors of 'ayas'(such as red & black), showing that it was a generic term. Hence it is clear that 'ayas' generally meant metal and not specifically iron.

Moreover, the enemies of the Vedic people in the 'Rig Veda' also use ayas, even for making their cities, as do the Vedic people themselves. Hence there is nothing in Vedic literture to show that either the Vedic culture was an ironbased culture or that there enemies were not.(http://www.hindunet.org/hindu_history/ancient/aryan/aryan_frawley.html)

South Indian Phylogeography permlink

Category: GeneticsPosted on: December 13, 2008 4:40 AM, by Razib

Genetic variation in South Indian castes: evidence from Y-chromosome, mitochondrial, and autosomal polymorphisms:

We report new data on 155 individuals from four Tamil caste populations of South India and perform comparative analyses with caste populations from the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh. Genetic differentiation among Tamil castes is low...reflecting a largely common origin. Nonetheless, caste- and continent-specific patterns are evident. For 32 lineage-defining Y-chromosome SNPs, Tamil castes show higher affinity to Europeans than to eastern Asians, and genetic distance estimates to the Europeans are ordered by caste rank. For 32 lineage-defining mitochondrial SNPs...Tamil castes have higher affinity to eastern Asians than to Europeans. For 45 autosomal STRs, upper and middle rank castes show higher affinity to Europeans than do lower rank castes from either Tamil Nadu or Andhra Pradesh. Local between-caste variation...exceeds the estimate of variation between these geographically separated groups...Low, but statistically significant, correlations between caste rank distance and genetic distance are demonstrated for Tamil castes using Y-chromosome, mtDNA, and autosomal data.

I don't want to get too hung up on the specific conclusions made in this paper about caste X in South Indian state Y. Rather, look at these neighbor-joining networks derived from various types of genetic data:http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2008/12/south_indian_phylogeography.php?utm_source=sbhomepage&utm_medium=link&utm_content=channellink

But our experience tells us the ULTIMATE TRUTH about the MONOPOLISTIC ruling Hegemony and its HOLY MOST SCRIPT MANUSMIRTI the FLIP of Apartheid! If the INVASION is false, why the INDIGENOUS and Aboriginal Black Untouchables have been MARGINALISED and ENSLAVED? Who Executed the KNOWLEDGE BAN infinite?

Pak parliament urges restraint, condemns war hype

Reuters

Islamabad: Pakistan's parliament on Wednesday called on India to respond positively to its offers of cooperation in investigating the Mumbai attacks and condemned "war hype" between the neighbours.

The National Assembly, Pakistan's lower house of parliament, unanimously passed a resolution expressing support for the government and urged New Delhi to reciprocate Islamabad's efforts to defuse tension.

"The National Assembly of Pakistan ... calls upon India to respond to the constructive proposals made by the government of Pakistan," Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Malik Emad Khan said while tabling the resolution.

"(The house) condemns the war hype in a situation where war is not an option given the nuclear capabilities of both countries," the assembly said. Fiery rhetoric has been coming from various quarters on both sides, much of it from media commentators, since the attacks.

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani said the country was prepared for any eventuality though war seemed unlikely. "There's tremendous public pressure on the Indian government because of their intelligence failure (to stop the Mumbai attacks) and now they want to make someone a scapegoat," he told reporters in Lahore.

"I don't think there will be a war but if they try to do such an adventure then the Pakistani nation is united. All forces in Pakistan are united."

India’s Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Tuesday asked Pakistan to avoid "war hysteria" and act against militants. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told reporters: "The issue is not war, the issue is terror and territory in Pakistan being used to promote, aid and abet this terror."

Tension has been simmering between Pakistan and India since 179 people were killed in last month's attacks in Mumbai that India has blamed on Pakistan-based militants. Pakistan has condemned the Mumbai attacks and denied any role in the assault.

Un-fricking-believable. Bush, talking to ABC's Martha Raddatz, does a Cheney on the lies leading up to the Iraq invasion and the messy misadventure of the occupation:

BUSH: One of the major theaters against al Qaeda turns out to have been Iraq. This is where al Qaeda said they were going to take their stand. This is where al Qaeda was hoping to take–

RADDATZ: But not until after the U.S. invaded.

BUSH: Yeah, that’s right. So what? The point is that al Qaeda said they’re going to take a stand. Well, first of all in the post-9/11 environment Saddam Hussein posed a threat. And then upon removal, al Qaeda decides to take a stand.

Dubya and his whole administration are determined to spin the whole of the last eight years as "ancient history". Raddatz should have thrown out her script at that point and eaten him alive, but she didn't. Yet another failure of the tame media, who are too afraid of losing their precious access to ask the obvious questions even now. Ian Williams of The Guardian laments the paucity of journalistic backbone on display:

With a few notable exceptions like Helen Thomas, Bush's press conferences have not generated the indignation he so richly deserves from a largely quiescent White House press corps that needs government inspectors and Congressmen to tell it when it can be surprised and even occasionally indignant.

In a parochial way, one can understand why the press corps lacks indignation over Iraq's 100,000 civilian dead and over two million external refugees, plus untold more internally displaced.

But it is still surprising that so many reporters can be polite and deferential with someone who has turned the US Federal Reserve into a giant Ponzi scheme and broken the world's strongest economy. They defer humbly to someone who has contrived the deaths of 4,200 US servicemen and women in Iraq. It even failed to follow through on questions about the president's murky military record with the Texas Air National Guard while his peers were dying in Vietnam. This intrepid presscorps showed no compunction in following in minute detail Clinton's screwingaround, but kept silent as Bush screwed entire nations.

Last week, a Senate report pointed the finger directly at Bush and his senior officials for authorising - indeed, ordering - torture and abuse of detainees. But no one threw any shoes.

It is that fawning quiescence that allowed Bush to tell Bob Woodward: "I'm the commander – see, I don't need to explain – I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

I'll give the Newshogger's Journalist of the Year Award to the first reporter to say to Dubya "You're the President, so what? You work for us, you're not the king."

Crossposted from Newshoggershttp://crooksandliars.com/taxonomy/term/1308

Buy, buy: India Inc rolls out the freebies, rebates

25 Dec 2008, 0126 hrs IST, Kiran Kabtta Somvanshi & Krishna Gopalan, ET BureauMUMBAI: Amidst fears of a slowdown, India Inc has decided to make the best use of the situation by showering consumers with alluring offers and freebies. Without any doubt, the gameplan is clear - to boost consumer spending and make sure that there is no significant slowdown on that least. It does seem like an extended festive season for consumers.

‘Got the money, come and buy’ is what the shoppers are being asked to do. At one level, what's on offer seems hard to believe. Starting with happy hours at beauty parlours all the way to discounts offered by hospitals for check ups, the party is on full swing. Retailers in the apparel business are also offering cash discounts topping 50%.

To their mind, the slowdown needs to be met head on and these ideas are the tools to tackle the situation. Across price points, consumers are being pampered like never before. It really does not matter if its realty prices or consumer durable products. Car makers have announced price cuts to improve sales.

In the pharma sector, Apollo Clinic has introduced several retail health packages that include preventive health check-ups. “This has been our best month ever,” says Mario Pereira, general manager, western region, Apollo Health & Lifestyle, the owners of Apollo Clinics chain. “These are low-cost packages and have been discounted by around 50%. They have been customised to attract the population in a particular area,” he adds.

The same story comes from the beauty parlour business, where the otherwise slack afternoon hours are now seeing business taking off. “We offer a facial, haircut and threading of eyebrow at less than Rs 300,” says the proprietor of a beauty salon located in Central Mumbai.

At the bourses, too, investors have been spoilt for choice. Stocks are available at great deals for those who think there is some serious money waiting to be made. Most of the bluechip stocks are trading at affordable discounted rates. Long-term investors, who have some surplus cash, can avail of this opportunity to invest in such stocks.http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/Economy/Finance/Buy_buy_India_Inc_rolls_out_the_freebies_rebates/articleshow/3888449.cms

JERUSALEM (AP) — Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip will pay a "heavy price" if they continue to target Israel, Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned Thursday, as the Israeli military wrapped up preparations for a possible invasion of the coastal territory.

In Cairo, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak urged Israel to show restraint in a meeting with visiting Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. She brushed aside the appeal, however, and insisted that Israel would respond to protect its citizens.

The talks came a day after Palestinian militants pummeled southern Israel from Gaza with more than 80 rockets and mortars, causing no injuries but generating widespread panic. Israeli Cabinet ministers approved a broad invasion of Gaza, defense officials told The Associated Press.

"We will not accept this situation," Barak warned. "Whoever harms the citizens and soldiers of Israel will pay a heavy price."

He did not elaborate. But defense officials, speaking on condition on anonymity because the information was classified, said the Israeli operation would likely begin with surgical airstrikes against rocket launchers and continue with a land invasion. Harsh weather conditions are hampering visibility and complicating air force missions, so the operation won't be launched until the skies clear, they added.

Twelve mortars were fired early Thursday, causing no injuries. One landed at Israel's passenger crossing with Gaza as a group of Christians were going through, en route to the West Bank town of Bethlehem for Christmas Day celebrations, the military said.

Israel has been reluctant to press ahead with a campaign liable to exact heavy casualties on both sides. Gaza militants operate in densely populated civilian areas, and past Israeli incursions have not halted the rocket barrages.

Israel left Gaza in 2005 after a 38-year occupation, but still controls its border crossings, blockaded for months in an effort to pressure militants to halt their fire. Islamic Hamas militants seized control of Gaza in June 2007, after routing security forces loyal to Western-backed Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.

A six month truce that began unraveling six weeks ago came to a formal end Friday, and rocket fire has been escalating.

Livni's meetings with Egyptian leaders in Cairo originally were designed to try to renew the Egyptian-mediated truce. But after Wednesday's bombardment, Livni — who is running for prime minister in Israel's February elections — dismissed that option.

In the meeting, Mubarak urged Israel to show restraint in the face of the rocket barrages. Livni replied that Israel would respond against attacks on Israeli targets.

"Enough is enough," Livni said. "When there's shooting, there's a response. Any state would react that way."

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert appealed to the people of Gaza on Thursday to turn against their Hamas rulers, saying they were responsible for the territory's suffering. Olmert told the Arabic-language Al-Arabiya TV that Israel would not hesitate to respond with force if attacks continued. "I am telling them now, it may be the last minute, I'm telling them stop it. We are stronger," he said.

In the West Bank, the Palestinian president, Abbas, visited Hebron, the area's largest city, for the first time since he took office in 2005. Israeli forces control a section in the middle of the city, because about 500 Jewish settlers live in several enclaves. Hebron is home to about 170,000 Palestinians.

Abbas demanded that the settlers get out. "Hebron is ours, and they have to leave if they want peace," he said.

Abbas also called on Israel to accept a 2002 Arab peace initiative, which offers peace between Israel and the Arab world in exchange for Israel's withdrawal from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights.

"Come to the ocean of peace that starts from Mauritania and ends in Indonesia," Abbas said.

Israel has said the initiative is a basis for negotiations but objects to some of its points.

THE WAR ON HYPEAmerica's fleecing in the name of securityVeronique de Rugy, Nick Gillespie

Rest easy, America. As a response to the Sept. 11 attacks, the Princeton, N.J., Fire Department now owns Nautilus exercise equipment, free weights and a Bowflex machine. The police dogs of Columbus, Ohio, are protected by Kevlar vests, thank God. Mason County, Wash., is the proud owner of a half-dozen state-of-the-art emergency radios (never mind that they are incompatible with existing county radios).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------All of these crucial purchases -- and many more like them -- were paid for with homeland security grants. Doesn't it make you feel more secure that $100,000 in such money went to fund the federal Child Pornography Tipline? That $38 million went to cover fire claims related to the April 2001 Cerro Grande fire in New Mexico? And that $2.5 billion went to "highway security" -- that is, building and improving roads?

Since Sept. 11, 2001, Congress has appropriated nearly $207 billion to protect us from terrorism. Total homeland security spending in 2006 will be at least $50 billion, split between the Department of Homeland Security and many other agencies, including, improbably, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Commerce and NASA. But far from making us more secure, the money is being allocated like so much pork. While the Department of Homeland Security is finally making some improvements in how it allocates resources, much more needs to be done, especially by Congress.

Indeed, as the above examples suggest, states and cities are spending federal homeland security grants on pet projects that have little or nothing to do with security. State and local officials fight over who will get the biggest share of the money, regardless of whether they have a legitimate claim to it. Hence, of the top 10 grant recipients, only the District of Columbia also appears on a list of the 10 places most at risk of attack (see table below). The U.S. Virgin Islands receives more per capita in homeland security spending ($104.35) than does Washington, D.C. ($34.16). So do Guam ($90.36), the Northern Mariana Islands ($54), Wyoming ($37.74) and American Samoa ($37.54).

And don't think high-risk cities necessarily spend their money wisely: The District of Columbia, for instance, used the first wave of homeland security aid as "seed money" for a computerized car-towing system Mayor Anthony Williams had promised for three years to help combat fraud by private towing companies. The city also used $100,000 in homeland security money to fund the mayor's popular summer jobs program.

When Congress isn't doling out cash indiscriminately, it's overreacting to yesterday's attacks instead of concentrating on cost-effective defenses against the most likely current threats. In the days after Sept. 11, Congress created the Transportation Security Administration, a 45,000-employee bureaucracy that spends more than the FBI or Secret Service and accounts for 10 percent of the total homeland security spending. The Transportation Security Administration, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, has still not figured out a comprehensive plan to screen airplane cargo for explosives. More to the point, the simple and relatively cheap solution of hardening cockpit doors has made Sept. 11-style hijackings virtually impossible.

In the aftermath of the two attacks on the London subway system in July, lawmakers and lobbyists proposed increases from $100 million to $6 billion in funding to secure public transportation. Yet if the London bombings teach us anything, it's that throwing money at transit security is unlikely to have an impact. After decades of combating Irish Republican Army terrorists, the London subway system is known to be one of the best protected in the world, but the large public investment in surveillance did not prevent the two terrorist attacks. The second incident occurred even while the system was in maximum alert mode. Experts agree that options are limited, if not nonexistent, for preventing such strikes. So why spend money on it?

If Congress were serious about homeland security, it would scrap the requirement that every state be guaranteed a part of the homeland security budget, abolish all grants to state and local governments, ban all earmarks from homeland security bills, and create better oversight for its homeland security spending. These steps would root out wasteful spending and ensure that funds were allocated based on risk rather than politics.

In 2004, the members of the independent Sept. 11 Commission stated that the current system is in danger of turning homeland security funding into pork-barrel spending and making security subsidies just another state entitlement program. They suggested that homeland security funding be based strictly on an assessment of risks. Their conclusions, mainly ignored by lawmakers, did cause public debate. Greater public outrage about the deeply flawed spending process may have encouraged the Department of Homeland Security to become a stronger advocate for reform ideas unpopular in the pork-hungry Congress.

The greatest potential for reform today is coming from the department itself, which spends more than half of all homeland security funds. Following the Sept. 11 Commission's recommendations, it has started pushing for a complete overhaul of the grant formula and a more risk-based approach to homeland security in general. A possible sign of that new attitude is the Transportation Security Administration's recent decision to allow passengers to carry some knives onto airplanes. It certainly isn't enough, but it's a step in the right direction of focusing on actual risks. Meanwhile, the department's inspector general has produced several extensive reports exposing bad practices and suggesting ways to curb wasteful spending.

If Congress is waiting for guidance before it acts, it need wait no longer.

Veronique de Rugy is a research scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Nick Gillespie is editor in chief of Reason, where a version of this piece also appears. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chroniclehttp://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/19/INGDDH8E311.DTL

Now see this in Dalit Voice:DV makes history in Oxford UniversityV.T. RAJSHEKAROur visit to the world-famous Oxford University Library — called Bodlein Group of Libraries, perhaps the oldest in the world — on July 19, 2006 was one of the most memorable events during our recent month-long lecture tour of England and USA.

Sir Monier Williams founded the Indian Institute Library which is a subscriber of Dalit Voice right from 1984 (DV was started in 1981).

Dr. Simon Lawson of the library, himself a scholar, received us and took us round the ancient building. He showed us bound volumes of DV of each year from 1984 up to 2005. The first three volumes are not there as the Library started subscribing to DV only from 1984. Besides, the library also has 22 out of the about 100 (DSA) books published by us.

We promised to send all the missing books particularly our international award-winning book, Caste-A Nation Within the Nation (2004).

He said in 1984 a student asked the library to subscribe to DV and since then they received every single issue of DV which, he said, was very popular with the students.

After the US Library of Congress in Washington, Bodlein Library is perhaps the world’s second biggest and the most ancient library. The 7-storeyed building of the New Bodlien Library had three floors underground and a collection of 9 million books. The Indian Institute Library is on the top floor.

Fate of Indian libraries: At a time when the Indian libraries are gathering dust, the Oxford Library is not only growing but attracting scholars from all over the world.

The library also had a full set of Dr. Ambedkar’s books.

Nirad Chaudhari, a noted Indian (Bengali) scholar who died in Oxford itself a couple of years ago, was a frequent visitor to the library. Max Muller, who got the whole lot of Brahminical scriptures translated from Sanskrit to English, was also associated with it. Nirad Chaudhary was not liked by the upper caste Indians there because he used to praise the British rule.

Brahminical tricks: Nirad Chaudhuri, in his biography of Max Muller, Scholar Extraordinary (1974, Orient paperback, pp.382), speaks of the development of the Indian library and how Max Muller failed to get the Oxford University Boden Professorship of Sanskrit which went to Monier Williams (1860).

Max Muller, a German who never visited India, fell a prey to Brahminical tricks and did so much to promote their Sanskrit literature what no other scholar had ever done.

Brahmins made full use of Max Muller but finally dumped him, dubbing him a Christian agent.

However, Brahmins exploited Muller to create a mad Western infatuation with Brahminism (called Hinduism). But alas after wasting his whole life on Brahmin literature and glorifying the Brahmin, Muller finally came to the conclusion that Hinduism lacked in humanity.

The Christian church wasted all its time and energy in India trying to convert the Brahmin to Christianity. If only it had devoted half the attention to Untouchables, they could have achieved wonders.

This only proves to what extent Muller, Monier Williams and the whole lot of British orientalists were fooled by the Brahminical bluffs.

Max Muller dies a sad man: Muller’s translation of the “Sacred Books of the East” which ran into bulky 49 volumes finally proved to be a futile exercise and Muller himself died (1900) a sad man.

How we wish the Indian Library in Oxford takes lessons from his life and gets closer to the life of indigenous Indians.

When Dr. Lawson asked our opinion, we said British rule did immense good to the Dalits in particular and other oppressed people. However, after India got “independence” and the Brahminical people started ruling India (1947), Dalits and other oppressed people suffered a lot. Dr. Lawson said they were fully aware of the situation and the role the Dalit Voice played to highlight these issues.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------COMMUNICATION:Dr. Ambedkar at Columbia UniversityMs. BINDU BHATT, LIBRARIAN, SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES, COLUMBIA UNIVRSITY, NEW YORKDr. Ambedkar was and is part of the remarkable Columbians list that was prepared in 2004 to celebrate 250 years of Columbia University. His name comes under the third entry in the list. The list is in alphabetical order by last name. Regarding the listing in Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, I am not sure why Dr. Ambedkar is not listed there. Certainly, he deserves to be in that list prominently. You can find Dr. Ambedkar’s name if one did a search under “Untouchables” in the encyclopedia.

Ambedkar was a leader in the struggle for Indian independence, the architect of the new nation’s constitution, and the champion of civil rights for the 60 million members of the “Untouchable” caste, to which he belonged. He spoke and wrote ceaselessly on behalf of “Untouchables,” but his passion for justice was broad: in 1950 he resigned from his position as the country’s first minister of law when Nehru’s cabinet refused to pass the Women’s Rights Bill. Dr. Ambedkar was committed to maintaining his independence, and many of the positions he staked out in a long and complex relationship with Gandhi” on the future of Hinduism, for example” remain central to debate within Indian society.

Dr. Ambedkar received a scholarship to Columbia from the Maharajah of Baroda. He earned his MA in 1915 and then obtained a DSc at the London School of Economics before being awarded his Columbia PhD in 1927. In 1952, Columbia presented him with an honorary doctorate for his service as “a great social reformer and a valiant upholder of human rights.” In 1995, a bronze bust of Ambedkar was donated to Lehman Library by the Federation of Ambedkarite and Buddhist Organizations of the United Kingdom.

At Columbia, Dr. Ambedkar studied under John Dewey, who inspired many of his ideas about equality and social justice. Dr. Ambedkar later recounted that at Columbia he experienced social equality for the first time. “The best friends I have had in my life,” he told the New York Times in 1930, “were some of my classmates at Columbia and my great professors, John Dewey, James Shotwell, Edwin Seligman, and James Harvey Robinson.”

Revised in January 2004 with help from Professor Sukhadeo Thorat of Jawharlal Nehru University and the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies, New Delhi.

******************

We visited the world-famous Columbia University (New York) on July 12, 2007 where Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar studied, and saw his bronze bust in the Law Dept. Library. There was no other bust, statue or photograph of any other person in the library hall. Dr. Bindu Bhatt, the Librarian hailing from Ranchi, took us round the library. Senior professors at the University remember Dr. Ambedkar and his contribution to the struggle of India’s Untouchables — EDITOR.

INTRODUCTIONIndia was never a nation. It was always a subcontinent of several warring nations unlike today’s China which can be called a nation with about 95% of the people belonging to one single (Han) nationality.

The British who ruled us knew this greatest weakness of India and had devised several mechanisms to keep the different warring nationalities fairly satisfied. The British India had the separate electorate to different nationalities doing so much good to the weaker sections. India was not even one single state (country), not to speak of one single nation. Even when the British were ruling, India had several autonomous kingdoms – most prominent being Hyderabad state under the Nizams. Mysore state was another kingdom. The Indian subcontinent had several religions – Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Sikhism, Parsees, and hundreds of castes and tribes. The north-eastern part of India under seven states today is completely Mongoloid tribal who never considered themselves part of India.

THREE PRINCIPAL SEGMENTSWith the exit of British (1947) the sub-continent broke into India and Pakistan and later the Bengali-speaking Muslims broke away from Pakistan to form their own Bangladesh.

India cannot be understood properly unless we know its population composition which are kept a closely guarded secret as today’s micro minority Hindu rulers want to suppress the aspirations of the different nationalities by calling India a Hindu nation.

India can be broadly divided into three principal segments. (See table)

POWER OF CONVERSIONThe first segment (65%) comprises the pre-Aryan original inhabitants of India who built the great glorious Indus Valley Civilisation – next only to the Nile Valley civilisation – which the invading Aryan’s completely destroyed.

The second segment, called the “religious minorities”, is also part of the first segment as over 95% of them are converts from the first segment. They sought salvation in the three egalitarian religions like Islam, Christianity and Sikhism and got liberated.

One example to prove the power of religious conversion. The Namashudras (Untouchables) of Bengal have a state of their own (Bangladesh) today because they embraced Islam and today they are a liberated people. If they had not, they too would have been slaves of Hindus like us. The oppressed Dalits were liberated from Hinduism which has sapped the very vitals of the country.

In other words, the people of the second segment are all our brothers. We Dalits, the Black Untouchables of India and the children of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, consider Muslims, Christians and Sikhs as our own brothers.

Our only complaint against Muslims, Christians and Sikhs is that after they got liberated they completely forgot us.

For committing this mistake, they are also suffering today and subjected to severe violence by the Hindu rulers.

The third segment is the one which can be called Hindu and their population is just 15% though they claim to be 80% by including the first segment. Our unwillingness to be annexed into the Hindu segment has led to many bloody wars and violence. This war is continuing.

INDIA IS NOT HINDUThe Hindu population is dwindling day by day as Islam and Christianity are attracting the oppressed Dalits and Tribals. The Hindus are warned that the days of their holy Hinduism are numbered.

The problem of multinational India is caused by the tiny 15% Hindus (which is their latest name) who want to impose their hegemony and called India a Hindu nation.

The figures I gave, however, prove the damn lie of the Hindus. In fact the Hindu thrives only on falsehood and false claims.

Today, India has become a country of several warring nationalities because this micro-minority Hindus led by the Brahmins want to impose their hegemony on the 85% of the unwilling nationalities.

JEWS & THE JEWS OF INDIAChina, which became independent two years after India, is today on the top of the world but we Indians are sinking because of this unending war and violence caused by the slavery imposed on our 85% of the Indian population by the Brahminical rulers.

For your information the Brahmins comprising just 3% of the population are the “Jews of India.”

Both have the same racial characteristics and both believe in enslaving the rest of the population.

Both Brahmins and Jews are a race and not a religion.

Lately, both the Jews and the Brahmins have joined hands to become the rulers of the world. They may like to be the rulers of the world but the world is not ready to accept it.

The Brahminical bid to enslave the people of India is not confined to Dalits. Even Muslims, Sikhs and Christians have become victims of this road-roller. Not only that. They even killed their own “Father of the nation”, M.K. Gandhi, who did so much to make Brahmins the rulers of India. When their job was done they did not hesitate to kill Gandhi.

SEPARATE ELECTORATE AS SOLUTIONSo, to solve this never-ending problem that has made India the world’s most violent country, we are pressing for separate electorate. The principle behind this is what is in fact separate must be acknowledged to be separate politically.

Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar demanded separate electorate for Dalits and the benevolent British rulers agreed to concede the demand in 1932. But the cunning Gujrati Baniya, M.K. Gandhi, goaded by his Brahmin bosses, went on a fast unto death (but he did not die) and sabotaged our future.

He destroyed the future of Dalits to make the Brahmins the rulers of India. The historic “Poona Pact” once for all sealed our fate and today India’s Untouchables constitute the world’s single largest slave population.

Our question is when the Brahmins are not prepared to compromise on their ethnic identity, why are they trying to convert the 65% non-Hindu original inhabitants into Hindu by destroying our ethnic identity?

PAIN OF MUSLIM, CHRISTIANS AND SIKHSThe Dalits are not Hindu and were never Hindu. Despite the best efforts of Brahmins, the Dalits and the rest have refused to give up their ethnic identity.

The Brahmins have been trying to Hinduise (enslave) us for 3,500 years but they have not succeeded. And they will never succeed.

As the Editor of Dalit Voice, India’s oldest and the largest circulated journal of the entire 85% “Persecuted nationalities denied human rights”, we support the principle of separate electorate to each nationality and also the right to self determination for Sikhs, Kashmiris, North Eastern Mongoloid tribals.

The Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and the Mongoloid tribals are all in great pain. We Dalits share their pain and suffer with them and offer our full support for their struggle of self-determination.

India is not a nation and was never a nation.

India can remain as one single state only when we are all assured of separate electorate and the right to self determination.

Or else, I warn, the country may break into pieces and the 65% SC/ST/BC’s will go over into Islam, Christianity and Sikhism to seek liberation.

The Great Syrian Christian dilemmaRAJU THOMAS, PARAPPALLY THALACKAL, ERAVIMANGALAM, KOTTAYAM - 686 613After several decades of theological and philosophical explorations, at last the Syrian Christians who have been dominating India’s both Roman Catholic and the Protestant Churches, have realized that it has been a total failure on their part to “liberate” the Dalits, Tribals and the BCs from Hindu slavery.

The Syrians claim that they were converted from Brahmins by St. Thomas in AD 52 when the Aryan Brahmins themselves did not arrive in the ancient Cheranadu (Kerala) until the 8th century AD. Syrians like to say that they were originally Brahmins and hence entitled to rule the Indian churches­ — be it Roman Catholic, Protestant or even the Evangelical.

DHARMARAM MEETINGA four-day “national consultation of philosophers” (June 1-4, 2006) organised by the Dharmaram College, Bangalore, discussed the theme “indigenous philosophizing”. The theme itself seemed to be confusing because the Syrian Christians and other Aryan upper caste Christians had been actually Brahminsing the Indian church calling it of “indianisation”.

It was Dalit Voice which had long back warned the church leaders not to Brahminise the church but the upper caste church leadership did not heed the warning of our Editor. Even churches were constructed resembling Hindu temples.

AGNIVESH POUNDEDThe Bangalore meeting strengthened our fears when we saw a noted Brahmin leader, Swami Agnivesh, inaugurating the meeting. Our Editor had a brush with him for ridiculing DV family member and a noted scholar-thinker, Dr. Kancha Ilaiah. Why the Syrians invited this notorious Hindu nazi whose Arya Samaj was against the liberation of Dalits and Tribals from Hinduism?

Some Syrians did not like the Editor’s criticism of Agnivesh but the Editor literally pounded the Telugu Brahmin just as Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar had once cut Gandhi to pieces at the Round Table Conference in London (1932).

CLASH OF IDENTITYThe fundamental question is: How far “indigenous philosophising” is going to challenge the Brahminical philosophy so that Dalits, Tribals and even the more Hinduised OBCs will be liberated? Or will it be another brand of Brahminization of the philosophical thoughts and the world view of the indigenous people of India? The native Indians have a higher value system to which the alien Aryan Brahminical Hindus have been always hostile because of the sharp contradictions between the identities of the Aryans and the Dalits. Where do the Syrian Christians stand?

Why these Christians still want to be known as Syrians when the language Syriac is not in use in their liturgy and worship? Or is this name “Syrian” a camouflage to identify with the Brahmins in India?

The Hindu terrorist organisation (RSS) and its leader K.S. Sudarshan are happy with the Syrians and he has already given a good conduct certificate to the Syrians. For all these years why the Syrians never thought of Dalits? Why this dilemma now? What is the conspiracy behind this move to suddenly “love” the Dalits?

We have every right to suspect this sudden “change of heart” among the Syrian theologians who control the entire Christiandom in India. They control and manufacture “theology”, they possess vast property, excellent institutions and can manipulate foreign funds like their Brahmin cousins.

Syrians no doubt run the best educational institutions but whom are they actually serving? They are serving our enemy and also the enemy of Christianity. How to trust the integrity of the Syrians when they have love affairs with our enemy-oppressors?

WHY THEY OPPOSE CONVERSION?How far the Syrian Christians (of Kerala), the Goans, the Mangaloreans and other Aryans who became Christians, are really committed to the cause of Christianity and Evangelisation in India? Had they been honest they could have turned India upside down and transformed the entire stinking Hindu rotten society. Why they did not do that? What is the secret?

SALVATION UNDER HINDUISMWe do not deny that there may be some honest Syrians but such of them are only an exception. Can any Syrian Bishop or theologian speak like Dr. K. Rajaratnam? Dr. K. Rajaratnam of the Lutheran Theological College, Madras, is not an ordinary Christian leader. He was the former president of National Christian Council that controls the Protestant Church. He said the mission of the Indian church was to liberate Dalits from the Hindu oppressors. Such a statement did not come from the Syrian “philosophers” at Bangalore.

Both the Catholic and Protestant theologians were fiddling with Dwaita, Advaita, mantra, tantra, moksha, karma, niskamakarma, vedic philosophy etc. Most of the earlier Protestant theologians were either Brahmins or upper castes. They wanted the Christians to believe that there was salvation in Hinduism. But they deliberately forgot that over 85% Indians were and are the victims of Hinduism. Catholic theologians argue that there is much liberative values in the Vedas and the Upanishads.

Only humble suggestion is that they should read the burning thoughts of Babasaheb Ambedkar who is the only philosopher that India has produced.

He said:

Philosophy is no purely theoretic matter. It has practical potentialities. Philosophy has its roots in solving the problems of life... (W&S, Vol-IV, last part-handwritten).

They are unwilling to come out of the Brahminical hold. Why? Is it just to please the Brahmins who are their blood relations or are they deliberately doing it because they do not want to antagonize the Brahmins?

This is the Great Dilemma facing the Syrians. The dilemma is whether to continue with the Brahminical philosophy (is it a philosophy in the right sense?) or come out of it, reject it, throw out of the church and then accept the philosophy of Babasaheb which is pro-people and life-oriented.

JESUS KILLEDJesus Christ did encounter the Roman rulers and the Jewish Pharasees who are equal to the Brahmins of India. He challenged them and had to die a political death. The dilemma before the Syrians today is whether to propound a theology and philosophy which would inspire the church to declare a war against the most dangerous, anti-human, diabolic Hinduism and save India. If they should accept all the prophets — John the Baptist (who was beheaded), Jesus Christ and their disciples ­—as the model and to have a true indigenous philosophy they should openly accept Babasaheb Ambedkar who is the greatest philosopher, theologian, thinker and a scholar who did not spare any subject on the face of the earth.

Whenever our Editor and Dr. Kancha Ilaiah raised such issues a few Syrians became uncomfortable.

What is the principal contradiction in India? Is it not Brahminical Hinduism? Babasaheb has said that to save India Hinduism/Brahminism should be destroyed. Do the Syrians have the prophetic courage, at least just to follow what Babasaheb has already said? This is the Great Dilemma before the Syrians.

Wanted national reservation act to save Backwards from racist judiciaryDR. J.V. GAVAI, HEAD, POLITICAL SCIENCE DEPT., NAGPUR UNIVERSITY, NAGPUR - 440 033A larger bench of the Supreme Court comprising seven judges under the then Chief Justice R.C. Lahoti ruled on Aug.12, 2005 that there shall not be any reservation or govt. quota in the admission of private professional educational institutions of higher learning whether they belong to minority or non-minority institution. There shall be 15% quota in these private professional educational institutions for non-resident Indians (NRI). The management of these institutions shall have unfettered right to impose more fees and the money collected shall be utilized for economically weaker students of the society. These institutions shall have full freedom to determine the procedure of admission as well as to decide fee structure.

HOSTILE TO SOCIAL JUSTICESuch anti-Backward decisions of the apex court is not only pro-capitalist, pre-industrialist, pro-educational mafia and profiteers but it is totally against the principle of social justice and social equality.

The verdict protected and promoted the interests of few haves and totally neglected the interests of the largest number of havenots (SC/ST/BCs) —deprived since centuries. The Indian higher judiciary once again mercilessly crushed the 85% Backward Classes population in favour of the 15% upper caste haves by totally flouting the clear-cut provisions of the constitution in favour of SC/ST/OBCs. This decision terribly affected the majority population in India —namely the Bahujan Samaj —and once again the judiciary proved its casteist, communal credentials and hatred against the havenots.

In fact, the apex court decision is not astonishing. Because the judiciary is gradually becoming hostile to the principle of social justice. Reservation is an instrument of socio-economic change to establish a society based on egalitarian principles. To certain extent steps were taken towards it by way of giving reservation in jobs as well as in admissions to education. (Judicial Terrorism, DSA-2006).

DISPLEASURE OF THE NATIONBut lately the judicial verdicts have been suffering from allergy to reservation. Despite numerous constitutional provisions, the courts under the pretext of judicial review and judicial activism have been going against the human rights of the oppressed.

This is because the judiciary is dominated by the upper castes who do not like SC/ST/BCs entering the mainstream. The courts started giving anti-reservation decisions despite a fait accompli by their predecessor in the judiciary regarding reservation issue. It has been giving highly detrimental decisions which are seriously affecting the oppressed classes.

It is now proved that the judiciary has become a stumbling block in the overall development of the deprived majority of India.

The judiciary came under the influence of anti-reservation racists and it flouted constitutional values, schemes, principles and the concept of welfare state, socialism and ultimately broken the dream of constitution-makers.

Even some legal luminaries, jurists and former judges expressed their reactions and concerns against the decision of the court. Some even went to the extent of committing suicides against the decision of the court. Most of the political parties have expressed strong feelings against the anti-reservation judgments of the Supreme Court. Even Parliament of India took serious cognizance of this decision and the Govt. of India itself expressed its total dissatisfaction and disagreement with the verdict of the apex court.

BID TO ABOLISH RESERVATIONSThat is how the Government decided to bringing legislation with a view to provide reservation in the non-aided private professional educational institutions whether they belong to minority or non-minority. Even the Prime Minister as well as the Human Resources Minister assured Parliament to bring new legislation to provide reservation in private educational institutions.

Over the last two decades, judiciary has been giving anti-reservation decisions. As a result, the larger section of BCs is badly affected by these decisions making them suspect that the higher judiciary is anti-people. The faith of the deprived classes is diminishing in the judicial system.

Under the pretext of judicial power and review it is making every effort to abolish reservation permanently from both education and employment. The judiciary is getting full support of the upper caste to crush the human rights of over 85% of the deprived population (Bahujan Samaj).

Reservation is a vital instrument of social change provided in the constitution to help the larger section of the society to enter the “mainstream” of the nation and strengthen nation-building. Despite all the hostility of the upper caste, the Backward population was getting some benefit though slowly. But these developments were not tolerated by the racist upper caste rulers.

LONE DALIT JUDGETo teach a lesson to the Backwards these racists finally found a big support in the higher judiciary which itself is almost 100% upper caste.

When the Backward population is about 85%, which is a social reality, Supreme Court ruled that reservation should not be above 50%. The judiciary virtually ousted reservation from government and semi-government services and admission in the private professional educational institutions. The worst affected field of reservation is education, strategically the most important.

When there are lakhs of vacant posts, under the influence of anti-reservation racists, the judiciary hatched a conspiracy by abolishing reservation applying traditional and illogical criteria.

Even after 59 years of “independence”, except Justice Balakrishnan there is no judge from the Backwards in the Supreme Court. You can imagine what will be the fate of the country with such a racist court presiding over the India. How can it oversee the implementation of the constitution which is so much in favour of the deprived?

QUOTA IN HIGHER JUDICIARYThe then Chief Justice Lahoti of the Supreme Court went to the extent of saying that judiciary has every right to chop the wings of the government and parliament. Hence there is an urgent need to bring a very clear-cut and comprehensive national reservation act through parliament. In this legislation, the reservation, which were denied during last 50 years by the judiciary should be restored whether that be a reservation in government employment or admission in the private professional educational institutions. In order to do social justice, very objective cadre-wise criteria should be applied to reservation instead of post-wise or subject-wise. On the contrary these flimsy criteria of post-wise/subject-wise reservation should be abolished and reservation should be applied at all levels of administration.

The proposed act should extend reservation to the judges of the SC as well as HCs, in all three armed forces (army, navy and air force), vice-chancellors of all universities.

The proposed act should be kept out of judicial scrutiny and by putting it under the Scheduled 9 of the Constitution.

Irrespective of party lines all SC/ST/BC and minority MPs must unite to protect and promote the interests of the Backwards and force the government to introduce a comprehensive reservation act to save the sinking over 85% India’s population. And thereby fulfil the dream of social justice and social equality propounded by Dr. Ambedkar.

THE SOLE SPOKESMANDALIT VOICE — A New Experiment in Indian JournalismDALIT — The Black Untouchables of India constitute about 20% of India's over 1,000 million population. Together with 10% Tribals, they make up a formidable 30% — far exceeding the population of entire Europe.But such a vast humanity, constituting the core of India's original inhabitants, is kept enslaved by less than 15% alien Aryans, India's ruling class.

Dalit Voice was the first Indian journal to expose this closely guarded secret and shock the outside world and make history.That is how Dalit Voice has become the organ of the entire deprived destitutes of India, the original home of racism.Started in 1981 by V.T. Rajshekar, its Editor and founder, Dalit Voice, the English fortnightly, has become the country's most powerful "Voice of the Persecuted Nationalities Denied Human Rights".

A veteran journalist, formerly of the Indian Express, powerful and fearless writer, V.T. Rajshekar, had to face the wrath of the ruling class, arrested many times, several jail sentences, passport impounded and subjected to total media boycott.

Published in several Indian languages including Hindi, Dalit Voice has become the sole spokesman for the entire deprived, dehumanised lot of India. Besides the Dalits, it looks after the interests of Backward Castes (35%) and the country's three persecuted religious minorities — Muslims 15%, Christians 2.5%, and Sikhs 2.5% — all victims of the Aryan Brahminical racism. Plus the women of all sections including the Hindu women.

In the course of the last 25 years, DV has become India's largest circulated journal of the oppressed, fighting against mainstream dailies and periodicals which have totally ignored the plight of the original inhabitants. Hence DV is rightly hailed as a new experiment in Indian journalism.

Only DV has diagnosed the disease of India which is an exception to all other countries in the world. If others have only "classes", India has not only the "class" but the world's most unique institution of caste system, which is the other word for racism. Here lies the success of DV. It goes to all world famous libraries, universities and invited many Afro-American delegations to India.

Its Editor is hailed as India's most original thinker, scholar and also philosopher. As India's most famous Dalit writer, he has authored over 60 world-famous books dealing with the problems of caste, ethnicity, Muslims, Christian, Sikhs, Marxism, Brahminism, Racism, Gandhism, Fascism etc.

Over 100 books have been published by the Dalit Sahitya Akademy, its sister organisation, also headed by the Editor.His book, Dalit - The Black Untouchables of India, published from the USA (Clarity Press, Inc., Suite 469, 3277 - Roswell Rd NE, Atlanta, GA.30305, ISBN 0-932863-05-1 , 2003 - 2nd print), has gone into several reprints uniting for the first time the Blacks of the world with the Black Untouchables of India.

His most important book, Caste — A Nation Within the Nation, which has gone into second print, is a marvellous thesis offering an ingenious weapon of "caste identity" to defeat Brahminism, the destructive ideology of the ruling class. In the latest Parliament election, the oppressed castes of India used this weapon and defeated the country's Brahminical party (BJP).

DV becomes the future media of India where its dailies and periodicals are slowly dying. Because only DV offers a lasting solution as the authentic voice of the country's tallest titan, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the Father of India.http://www.dalitvoice.org/about.htm

Mayawati case is Classical as her Social Engineering accomodates the CASTE Hindus strategically and in return they use our DEMOGRAHICAL Status as Vote Bank! further they INJECT a Brahaminical culture of ADULTERY in our veins!

Rejecting the demand for a CBI probe into the murder of a PWD engineer in Uttar Pradesh allegedly by a BSP MLA, Chief Minister Mayawati strongly condemned what she claimed to be ‘a mischievous campaign’ by the Opposition to defame her government by linking the killing to her birthday celebration.To counter the campaign, Mayawati said that her party would observe her birthday on January 15 by organising huge rallies across the state against the Congress, BJP and SP's ‘wrong doings’ during their rule in the state.

"Where is the need for a CBI probe when the state police, on my orders, have arrested all the accused in the case," Mayawati told a crowded press conference a day after PWD engineer M K Gupta's murder allegedly by MLA Shekhar Tiwari shook the state.

Describing the incident at Auraiya as ‘tragic’, Mayawati blamed the Congress, BJP and SP for trying to take ‘political mileage’ out of it, instead of condoling along with the grieving family.

Charging the Congress-led UPA, supported by SP, and the BJP-led NDA with being ‘the epitome of corruption’, she said these Opposition parties were so perturbed over their shrinking mass base, that they had no other issue against the BSP government but to link the engineer's murder to her birthday celebrations.

The Chief Minister accused the opposition parties of ‘dancing to the tunes of corporate houses and big business’ and framing policies according to their diktats.

"The UPA government's policies are made in the drawing rooms of corporate honchos. The stories of corruption of SP are on the lips of every citizen. Therefore, these parties should not open their mouths," Mayawati said, adding that they have been thoroughly exposed among the masses.

The BSP supremo said she had asked all her party legislators and MPs not to collect any fund for the upcoming general elections. "This job will be done by those in the party organisation," Mayawati said.

If it is all about the Power Politics in North India amidst the Focused WAR Mania and Blind Nationalism provoked by the both wings of Brahaminical hegemony, UPA as well as NDA, SOUTH INDIA remains in the same CHRONOLOGY of HISTORY! We may not be aware of as we never identify ourselves with PRE ARYAN Identity as NION ARYAN BLACK UNTOUCHABLES and have rooted ourselves in FALSE ARYAN Iedentity roots very DEEP!After a decade-long struggle, Dalits at Panthapuli village in Tirunelveli district entered the Kannanallur Mariamman temple with help of district officials defying a ban imposed by caste Hindus. Dalits led by District Collector G Prakash and Superintendent of Police Asra Garg, entered the temple at Panthapuli near Sankarankovil on Wednesday. Though the caste Hindus resented the entry, they did not, however, make any effort to resist the move, apparently due to stern warning issued by Prakash.

The Collector has initiated speedy steps to take over the temple by the Hindu Religious and Charitable endowment Board. In order to prevent untoward incidents, police had been deployed in adequate numbers in the sensitive areas. The temple, which was closed for nearly ten years due to conflict between Dalits and upper castes, has been opened and poojas would be performed on regular basis by all, officials said.

A section of the caste Hindu families resisted the entry of Dalits in the past even though the local munsiff court permitted them to enter the temple. Due to tension, both Dalits and the caste Hindus left their homes in the village and settled in nearby hills. The issue gained prominence after the CPM state unit recently threatened to take Dalits inside the temple. On December17, 200 CPM volunteers courted arrested, trying to enter the temple.

After this, the district administration initiated steps to facilitate the entry of Dalits into the temple. "It is all government show now, they have done what we threatened to do", said a local CPM leader.

Iman, alias Ajmal Kasab, has written a letter to the Pakistani authorities seeking legal aid and the appointment of a lawyer to represent him. Malik had said on Tuesday that Pakistani officials were examining Iman's letter and would respond to it by Wednesday.

However, there has been no official response so far from the Pakistan government to Iman's letter. Pakistan has been insisting that India should share evidence and information to establish Iman's nationality and to take forward the probe into the Mumbai attacks.

Though Malik has contended that a scrutiny of NADRA records had not produced any information on a Pakistani national named Ajmal Kasab, the organisation's database covers only 60 million of the country's total population of nearly 160 million.

The Prominent English daily famous for the INFAMOUS LEAK of DR Manamohan`s Stance on Nuclear deal challenging the LEFT to withdraw SUPPORT, once again has reported quite a senstaional piece! Just see!

Unguided missiles in war of words SUJAN DUTTA AND OUR GUWAHATI BUREAUDec. 24: Words like unguided missiles have raised the spectre of an air war between India and Pakistan.

Pakistan’s fighter aircraft are forward deployed and are flying ear-shattering sorties over its major cities, creating a war hysteria among its public.

In India, a preparation for the worst is not accompanied by a declaration of intent for hostilities. But the chief of the Indian Air Force’s largest command today chose to claim that the IAF is capable of hitting “5,000 targets” in Pakistan.

“The IAF has earmarked 5,000 targets in Pakistan. But whether we will cross the LoC or the International Border to hit the enemy targets will have to be decided by the political leadership of the country,” P.K. Barbora, the air officer commanding-in-chief of Western Air Command, said in Guwahati today

The words evoked shock and awe among diplomats because the political leadership is signalling otherwise. Air headquarters in New Delhi may still tamp down what Barbora has had to say. But that is in the very nature of brinkmanship.

It is now time for bluster, not boom-boom.

It is apt. Inside the defence ministry in South Block, army, navy and air force officers display letters and postcards from citizens who are praising the armed forces and are urging war. Some of the postcards are colourful with “Attack Pakistan” written in bold capital letters.

The remarks of Barbora, the decorated, chain-smoking officer, are in keeping with the mood that is gripping the military. They do not constitute a call to arms.

“Air power is lethal and escalatory and is therefore to be used with great caution,” said Air Marshal (retired) Padamjit Singh “Pudding” Ahluwalia, Barbora’s immediate predecessor as the Western Air Command chief. “And war plans are based on objectives. What kind of objective you must have is the crucial decision that has to be handed down. Ideally, you must have the capability to defeat the adversary’s will to fight,” he added.

There is little evidence that the Cabinet Committee on Security has given a directive to the military to ready for an offensive and, indeed, what kind of target that offensive should seek to achieve. Barbora’s comments today do not reflect that he has got a directive.

The area of responsibility of the Western Air Command is from Kashmir to Rajasthan — almost the entire frontage of the border with Pakistan, barring Gujarat. It has more than 200 bases. Barbora oversees all IAF operations from Siachen to Sindh, has offensive as well as defensive responsibilities (including the defence of the national capital) and, without a shade of doubt, has the best fighting assets of the force under his command.

The Western Air Command is also the primary target of the Pakistan Air Force. The postulating with fighter aircraft over Rawalpindi and Lahore is heard loud and clear in Palam.

In a blitzkrieg kind of scenario, an air force does not really keep count of the number of bombs it is dropping or, indeed, the number that are hitting and missing targets.

In the hypothetical scenario of the Indian Air Force trying to hit 5,000 targets, it is an indication that India and Pakistan are raring for a three-dimensional conventional war. In such a scenario, the air forces will have operational, strategic and tactical targets that could number over 5,000, if they so desired.

In the unlikely event of that happening, both India and Pakistan, experienced in waging wars and each nurturing a military that is trained to fight the other, the top brass are as concerned about keeping up the morale as they are about the escalatory phases in a war.

In the last two instances of military mobilisation — Kargil in 1999 and Operation Parakram in 2001-2002 — that was evident.

In Kargil, the war did not spill over more than two sectors along the LoC. True, the artillery fired at each other but the aircraft were instructed not to cross over. Army officers defined this as “limited conventional war”.

In 2001-2002, the forces fully mobilised, hurled abuses, threats, moved assets, laid minefields in which their own troops were killed. But they did not go to war.

If there are 5,000 targets, it is still early to start counting.http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081225/jsp/frontpage/story_10299108.jsp

How do you count eight packs? The question plagues you when you first come at Aamir Khan in his new movie. His rippling musculature has been all the focus, through the past month, in print, in TV, in hoardings. That, and the buzz cut, with deep scars running through, showing the scalp. This is an Aamir we haven't seen before—fronting a frame filling physique, flaunting matter over mind.

If you had 15 minutes of memory, what would you cram into that terrifyingly short span? The name of your loved one, your phone number, your home? If you were a regular joe, that's exactly what you'd do, but if you are Aamir Khan in ‘Ghajini', you would bulk up your body, tattoo the name of the man you need to kill, and smear your walls with violent graffiti.

Short term memory loss means you forget, everything, within a short span of time. And the moment you get back into the zone, re-building the pieces of your life, the clock starts ticking again, for the next meltdown. It's a fascinating premise for a movie, and a few years ago, ‘Memento', made by Christopher Nolan, gave us a unique hero who suffers from short haul amnesia, while he searches for his beloved's killer.

In 2005, the Tamil ‘Ghajini', inspired by ‘Memento', catapulted the till-then-on-the-fringes lead pair of Surya and Asin into the frontlines, and turned out to be a monster hit.

Aamir Khan's first film this year, is a faithful remake of the Tamil film (with a lot of the original crew , including the director) barring a couple of twists in the climax. It has Aamir doing an out-and-out actioner after a long time (‘Sarfarosh' in 1999 was the last time he went around brandishing guns and decimating baddies). It also has him bare-chested for a lot of the running time, because he needs to display his impressively muscled frame. So is it all good?

Not really, no. The thing with doing a film like this is that you have to completely get with the flow of the film, and here Aamir is split down the middle. When he's Sanjay Singhania, the billionaire boy friend of wannabe celeb Kalpana (Asin), pretending to be a broke model himself, to insinuate himself into her good books, he's just fine.

The sequence in which he first sees her help a bunch of disabled kids and loses his iron-clad heart to her, is a winner. So are a few others: how many impossibly wealthy men carry ‘chutta' to give the ‘pani puri wala'? He flips him his platinum card, and we crack a smile, as we are meant to.

And then the transformation from smooth urbane tycoon, to the damaged violent guy happens, and the film starts to stutter. Not because Aamir doesn't try hard. He goes at this one with just as much effort as he does in his others, but he doesn't fill out this part with as much conviction. It's all his fault--- he shouldn't have done films like ‘Rang De Basanti' and ‘Taare Zameen Par', in which he coasted on his cerebral appeal. He just doesn't look the part of a man who can pulp other humans with his bare hands, despite the wild grimaces and the angry howls.

The maximum fun is had by Asin, nicely curved and rounded, very far from unreal size zeroes, making her Hindi cinema debut. She plays pretty much the same role as she did in the original-- loud, warm, emotional, and is the best part of the movie, but even she can't liven up the pallid songs-and-dances. Third lead Jiah Khan, the medical student who studies the amnesiac and ends up first hindering then helping him, is a total loss-- she has to speak Hindi and do an item number, and both are beyond her. The villain (Pradeep Rawat) looks like he's a bit part stretched into something he can't quite handle: is he the only one they could find?

Too long, at three hours and some. Too violent. The bad guy goes around wielding a rusted iron jack and bashing peoples' heads in. And so not Aamir: ‘Ghajini' is engaging, only intermittently. Can we please have our old Aamir, the actor-star who's taught present-day mainstream Bollywood to think, back again?http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Ghajini-Movie-Review/402773/

Joint Statement on United States-Pakistan Strategic Partnership A Joint Statement was released on July 28, 2008 during Pakistan Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani’s visit to the United States. Presented below is the full text of the statement:

Joint Statement on United States-Pakistan Strategic Partnership

White House News

President George W. Bush welcomed Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gillani to Washington today for his first visit to the United States as the leader of Pakistan's democratically-elected civilian government. The President and Prime Minister reaffirmed their commitment to the long-term Strategic Partnership between the United States and Pakistan, which is based on shared values and holds immense potential for the enduring peace, security, stability, freedom, and prosperity of Pakistan and of the region. The President affirmed his support for Pakistan's sovereignty, independence, unity, and territorial integrity. The two leaders agreed that the focus of the broad-based Pakistan-U.S. relationship should remain on ensuring the well being of the people by assisting Pakistan to implement its national development agenda in a comprehensive manner. Pakistan and the United States. will work together to eliminate the threat of extremism, build strong democratic institutions, modernize education, and increase economic growth and opportunity.

President Bush and Prime Minister Gillani reaffirmed their condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations. They acknowledged that terrorism and violent extremism pose a common threat to Pakistan, the United States, and the international community. The two leaders pledged to work together to address this threat and to deny any space to militants or terrorists through increased cooperation. The President recognized the sacrifices the people of Pakistan and the Pakistani security forces have made in the ongoing fight. The President and Prime Minister reiterated that success in countering terrorism will require a comprehensive strategy, including increased security, improved governance, and opportunity for socio-economic development for the people especially in the less-developed regions of Pakistan. The President and the Prime Minister expressed deep sympathy for the families of those who have fallen victim to suicide and other terrorist attacks in Pakistan. The Prime Minister expressed appreciation for U.S. efforts to promote peace and stability in the region. The United States is dedicated to providing Pakistan with the support and tools it needs to lead the fight against terrorism.

The two leaders also committed to increased bilateral economic cooperation to include expanded trade, an improved investment climate, promoting cooperation in the public and private sectors, and agreed to work together to ensure food and energy security as well as facilitate investment in infrastructure and social sectors in Pakistan.

In reaffirming the Strategic Partnership, President Bush and Prime Minister Gillani attached importance to the next round of the Strategic Dialogue, which will be co-chaired by the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State and Pakistan's Foreign Minister, in September 2008 and regularly thereafter to review issues of mutual interest. In addition, the two leaders committed both countries to undertake the following steps in development, counterterrorism, economic, and regional cooperation:

Focus on the needs of the Pakistani people: Food, Health, Education, Energy, and Democratic Governance

* The two leaders welcomed recent efforts in the U.S. Congress to extend the United States' assistance commitment to Pakistan to help address Pakistan's most urgent needs, including education, agriculture, and energy. The President will continue to work with Congress to ensure the continued support of the United States to Pakistan over the long term.

* The two leaders agreed to institute a separate track for agricultural cooperation under the Strategic Dialogue.

* The United States will provide $115.5 million in food security assistance to Pakistan, including $42.5 million over the next nine months.

* The United States will assist with disease control activities in Pakistan to augment the Prime Minister's initiative to combat the spread of hepatitis and other infectious diseases.

* The United States highlighted its $30 million Pakistan Energy Development program focused on improving power availability, affordability, and efficiency.

* The United States and Pakistan will hold the next round of the U.S.-Pakistan Energy Dialogue this fall to help Pakistan meet its vast and growing energy needs.

* The two leaders agreed to hold the next round of the U.S.-Pakistan Education Dialogue later this year.

* The two leaders agreed to continue and enhance robust collaboration in science and technology under the successful bilateral Science and Technology Framework Agreement.

* The United States highlighted its support for democracy-building and improved governance through project funding.

Expand Bilateral Trade and Improve the Business Climate

* The two leaders renewed a joint commitment to pursue steps to establish Reconstruction Opportunity Zones that will expand trade opportunities in parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

* The United States and Pakistan will work together toward a goal of establishing direct non-stop flights between the two countries before the end of 2008, expanding people-to-people ties and improving the investment climate to the benefit of the people of both countries.

* The United States and Pakistan agree to convene officials promptly to review the status of bilateral investment treaty negotiations.

* The two countries will reconvene the Joint Council under the Trade and Investment Framework Agreement in September 2008.

* The U.S.-Pakistan Economic Dialogue will be held on August 11 in Islamabad.

Expand Security and Counterterrorism Cooperation

* The two leaders agreed to strengthen the long-term security relationship with a view to enhancing Pakistan's defense capabilities, especially in the field of counterterrorism, through training and equipment.

* Reconvene the bilateral Defense Consultative Group this fall with a renewed focus on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism.

* Renew cooperative efforts to root out extremism along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, including the Northwest Frontier Province, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and Balochistan.

* Expand cooperation between the United States. and the Pakistani Frontier Corps and other Pakistani security forces on the front lines in the fight against violent extremism.

* Focus U.S. security assistance on efforts to enhance the counterterrorism capability of Pakistan's military forces.

Work Together to Enhance Regional Peace, Security, and Stability

* Strengthen the Tripartite Commission between the International Security Assistance Force, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

* Support the efforts of Pakistan and Afghanistan to hold the next joint jirga this fall.

* Hold the next Regional Economic Cooperation Conference in Islamabad this fall.

Prime Minister Gillani thanked President Bush and the people of the United States for the hospitality accorded to him, Mrs. Gillani, and the members of the Prime Ministerial delegation during their stay in the United States.

Source: The White House

Text of the North West Frontier Province Government’s agreement with the Taliban Presented below are points of the peace agreement between the North West Frontier Province Government and Swat-based Taliban militants on May 21, 2008:

1: Taliban of Swat will accept the writ of the provincial and central governments of Pakistan and will remain in the ambit of that

2: Shariat-e-Muhammadi will be implemented in Malakand Division

3: No one will attack other’s religion

4: Prisoners will be released after reviewing the cases against them

5: Government machinery, law enforcement agencies, government officials, buildings and installations, police stations, policemen, police lines, army, Frontier Corps, Frontier Constabulary, bridges, roads, and electricity installations will not be attacked; there will be a complete ban on keeping private militias, there will be no suicide attacks, there will be no blasts in personal or governmental buildings, and there will be no remote-controlled bomb blasts

6: Army withdrawal will be gradual keeping in view the security situation in the area

7: Non-local militants will be immediately handed over to the government. Attacks on barber shops and markets visited by women should be stopped

8: Government will compensate the deserving people affected by the operation in Swat

9: There will be no ban on health teams administering vaccination or drops to children against diseases like polio. There will be no ban on girls’ education

10: There will be complete ban on display of arms and only arms having licence would be allowed

11: Kidnapping and car lifting should be condemned and eliminated. All centres used for training militants and use of explosives must be eliminated

12: Speeches will be allowed only on that FM radio having licence

13: Local Taliban will cooperate with government in investigations of cases against those involved in murders, dacoities and kidnapping

14: The government will take action against thieves, dacoits, kidnappers and others involved in such crimes

15: Imam Dheri will be converted into an Islamic university under the management of a committee comprising representatives of government and Taliban

16: Minister for Environment Wajid Ali Khan, Dr Shamsher Ali Khan, DIG of Malakand, and DPO of Swat from the government’s side and Muhammad Amin, Ali Bakht, Muslim Khan, Mehmood Khan and Nisar Khan from Taliban side are members of the committee to oversee implementation of the agreement.

Source: Daily Times, May 22, 2008

Transcript of Osama bin Laden's Speech, April 2006 Edited translation of an audiotape attributed to Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, parts of which were aired by Aljazeera on April 23, 2006. (It is not known where or when the recording was made.)

Praise be to Allah, Lord of the world, prayer and peace be upon our prophet Muhammad, his kin and all his companions.

Peace, Allah's mercy and blessing be upon you, as I am directing this speech to all the Islamic Umma, to continue talking and urging them to support our prophet Muhammad, and to punish the perpetrators of the horrible crime committed by some Crusader-journalists and apostates against the master of the predecessors and successors, our prophet Muhammad.

The holy verses of the Quran and the holy prophetic teachings have all clarified the need for according love, respect and obedience to our prophet. Allah, the Almighty, has made it a taboo to offend him, saying in the Quran those who harm Allah and his messenger would be damned and severely punished.

It was also confirmed by an authentic source that prophet Muhammad said no one could be faithful until he loves me more than he loves his parents, his sons and all other people. Therefore, the Umma has reached a consensus that he who offends or degrades the messenger would be killed. Such offence is regarded as kufr (infidelity).

We ask Allah to give his blessings to whoever decried the behaviour of the infidels who have offended the prophet in every part of the world, and blessings to those who have died in the process, while we vow to Allah to avenge for those whose blood have been spilled.

The West is incapable of recognising the rights of others. It will not be able to respect others' beliefs or feelings. The West still believes in ethnic supremacy and looks down on other nations. They categorise human beings into white masters and coloured slaves.

This is why they established institutions and enacted laws to maintain their supremacy by creating the United Nations and the veto power ... . They regard jihad for the sake of God or defending one's self or his country as an act of terror. US and Europe consider jihad groups in Palestine, Chechnya, Iraq and Afghanistan as terrorist groups, so how could we talk or have understanding with them without using weapons?

On their part, the rulers of our region consider the US and Europe as their friends and allies while looking at the jihad groups that fight against the Crusaders in Iraq and Afghanistan as terrorist groups as well. So how can we reach understanding with those rulers who deny us the right to defend ourselves and our religion without carrying arms?

The net result of their thinking is for us to abandon jihad and acquiesce to remaining as their slaves. This is impossible, God willing.

The Palestine question is a manifestation of such injustices when the allied forces of the Crusaders and the Zionists decided to hand over Palestine to the Zionists to establish a state after committing massacres, displaced the indigenous Palestinians and brought Jews from all over the world to settle in Palestine.

The ongoing injustice and aggression did not stop in the last nine decades, while all attempts to reclaim our rights and exact justice on the Israeli oppressors, were blocked by the leadership of the Crusaders and Zionists' alliance by using the so-called veto power.

Such attitudes were also reflected by their rejection of the Hamas movement and its victory in the elections ... . Their rejection to Hamas has reaffirmed that they were waging a crusade against Islam.

The US sought to reach southern Sudan, recruited an army of southerners, supported them with weapons and funding and directed them to seek separation from Sudan.

Then it exercised pressure against Khartoum government to sign an unjust agreement which permits south Sudan to gain independence from the north within six years.

[Sudanese President Omar] al-Bashir and [US President George] Bush should have been aware that this agreement is not worth the ink by which it was written, and we do not accord the least concern to it. Nobody, whoever he was, has the right to accede an inch of the land of Islam and the south will remain an inseparable part of the land of Isalm, God willing, even if the war continued for decades.

The US was not satisfied by all the sedition and crimes, but went on to incite sedition, the largest of which was the west Sudan sedition by exploiting some disputes between the tribes and sparking a savage war between them that will spare nothing, prior to sending in Crusader troops to occupy the region and steal its oil wealth under the pretext of peacekeeping.

This is a continuous Crusader-Zionist war against Muslims. In this respect I am inviting the mujahidin and their supporters in the Sudan and other countries around, including the Arabian peninsula in particular, to prepare all that is needed for a long-term war against the Crusaders and thieves in western Sudan.

Our objective is obvious, that is defending Islam, the people and the land but not Khartoum government since our differences with them are so enormous, mostly when it backtracked in implementing the Sharia law and abandoned south Sudan.

I urge the mujahidin to get acquainted with Darfur state tribes and land and its surroundings, keeping in mind that the region is about to face the rainy season that hampers means of transport.

This is one of the reasons why the occupation was adjourned for six months. So it is imperative to speed up action and benefit from the time factor by stocking a large amount of landmines and anti-armour grenades such as RPGs [rocket propelled grenades].

What was the aim behind barring arms from the unarmed people in Bosnia and letting the Serb army to massacre Muslims and spill their blood for years under UN cover? It was a Crusader war against Muslims.

What was the aim of the pressure against Indonesia by the Crusaders countries until East Timor, 24 hours after a warning by the UN? A Crusader-Zionist-Hindu war against Muslims.

Meanwhile, a UN resolution passed more than half a century ago gave Muslim Kashmir the liberty of choosing independence from India and Kashmir.

George Bush, the leader of the Crusaders' campaign, announced a few days ago that he will order his converted agent [Pakistan President Pervez] Musharraf to shut down the Kashmir mujahidin camps, thus affirming that it is a Zionist-Hindu war against Muslims.

With respect to Pakistan, some Muslims have done a good job by assisting their fellow Muslims, God bless them, but the Pashtun tribes must be aided after the Pakistan army devastated their homes in Waziristan in order to satisfy the US.

What does the silence over Russian atrocities inside Chechnya mean, along with mutilating their bodies by tying them to tanks while the so-called free world gives its blessings and even secretly supports the aggression ? This is a Zionist crusade.

What does the humiliation of Muslims in Somalia and killing 13,000 Muslims mean, along with torching Muslims' bodies? This is a Zionist-Crusaders war.

I will remind Muslims to fear God and to save their brothers in the African Horn from the famine that hit them.

What does the destruction of the infrastructure in Iraq mean and the tragedy that befell them mean? And the use of depleted uranium, besieging Iraq for years, causing the death of more than one million children which amazed all who had visited Iraq, including the Westerners themselves? It is a malicious crusade against Muslims.

What does the reoccupation of Iraq mean by using lies and deception along with murder, destruction, detention, torture and creation of huge military bases to dominate the whole region? It is a Zionist crusade against Muslims.

What about the continuous cultural domination through the setting up of radio stations and TV channels along with the Voice of America, London and others to continue the cultural domination of Muslims, combat our beliefs, change our values, encourage vice and even interfere with school curricula?

How can we explain France's stance on the headscarf and the banning on wearing it at schools, its relentless dealing with the Muslim community and its plan to establish a TV channel in Morocco to combat Islamic awareness there? This is a Zionist-Crusader war.

In conclusion, a war is under way to offend the messenger of Allah, his religion and his Umma (nation). The Muslim preparedness and their jihad should be on a par with these events. The duty of our Muslim nation over this Crusaders' campaign with its different aspects is to focus on supporting the prophet, his religion and the Umma to the best of our ability in all fields.

Despite the numerous Crusader attacks against our Muslim nation in military, economic, cultural and moral aspects, but the gravest of them all is the attack against our religion, our prophet and the our Sharia tenets. The epicentre of these wars is Baghdad, the seat of the khalifate rule. They keep reiterating that success in Baghdad will be success for the US, failure in Iraq the failure of the US.

Their defeat in Iraq will mean defeat in all their wars and a beginning to the receding of their Zionist-Crusader tide against us. Your mujahidin sons and brothers in Iraq have taught the US a hard lesson while in the fourth year of the Crusaders' invasion, they are steadfast and patient and keep killing and wounding enemy soldiers every day.

It is a duty for the Umma with all its categories, men, women and youths, to give away themselves, their money, experiences and all types of material support, enough to establish jihad in the fields of jihad particularly in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Sudan, Kashmir and Chechnya. Jihad today is an imperative for every Muslim. The Umma will commit sin if it did not provide adequate material support for jihad.

O fellow Muslims, pay no heed for the number of the enemy and their arsenal of arms because victory is a gift of God while the enemy, praise be to God, is experiencing a critical situation.

Whereas certain questions have arisen regarding the frontier of Afghanistan on the side of India, and whereas both His Highness the Amir and the Government of India are desirous of settling these questions by friendly understanding, and of fixing the limit of their respective spheres of influence, so that for the future there may be no difference of opinion on the subject between the allied Governments, it is hereby agreed as follows:

The eastern and southern frontier of his Highness’s dominions, from Wakhan to the Persian border, shall follow the line shown in the map attached to this agreement.

The Government of India will at no time exercise interference in the territories lying beyond this line on the side of Afghanistan, and His Highness the Amir will at no time exercise interference in the territories lying beyond this line on the side of India.

The British Government thus agrees to His Highness the Amir retaining Asmar and the valley above it, as far as Chanak. His Highness agrees, on the other hand, that he will at no time exercise interference in Swat, Bajaur, or Chitral, including the Arnawai or Bashgal valley. The British Government also agrees to leave to His Highness the Birmal tract as shown in the detailed map already given to his Highness, who relinquishes his claim to the rest of the Waziri country and Dawar. His Highness also relinquishes his claim to Chageh.

The frontier line will hereafter be laid down in detail and demarcated, wherever this may be practicable and desirable, by joint British and Afghan commissioners, whose object will be to arrive by mutual understanding at a boundary which shall adhere with the greatest possible exactness to the line shown in the map attached to this agreement, having due regard to the existing local rights of villages adjoining the frontier.

With reference to the question of Chaman, the Amir withdraws his objection to the new British cantonment and concedes to the British Governmeni the rights purchased by him in the Sirkai Tilerai water. At this part of the frontier the line will be drawn as follows:

From the crest of the Khwaja Amran range near the Psha Kotal, which remains in British territory, the line will run in such a direction as to leave Murgha Chaman and the Sharobo spring to Afghanistan, and to pass half-way between the New Chaman Fort and the Afghan outpost known locally as Lashkar Dand. The line will then pass half-way between the railway station and the hill known as the Mian Baldak, and, turning south-wards, will rejoin the Khwaja Amran range, leaving the Gwasha Post in British territory, and the road to Shorawak to the west and south of Gwasha in Afghanistan. The British Government will not exercise any interference within half a mile of the road.

The above articles of' agreement are regarded by the Government of India and His Highness the Amir of Afghanistan as a full and satisfactory settlement of all the principal differences of opinion which have arisen between them in regard to the frontier; and both the Government of India and His Highness the Amir undertake that any differences of detail, such as those which will have to be considered hereafter by the officers appointed to demarcate the boundary line, shall be settled in a friendly spirit, so as to remove for the future as far as possible all causes of doubt and misunderstanding between the two Governments.

Being fully satisfied of His Highness’s goodwill to the British Government, and wishing to see Afghanistan independent and strong, the Government of India will raise no objection to the purchase and import by His Highness of munitions of war, and they will themselves grant him some help in this respect. Further, in order to mark their sense of the friendly spirit in which His Highness the Amir has entered into these negotiations, the Government of India undertake to increase by the sum of six lakhs of rupees a year the subsidy of twelve lakhs now granted to His Highness.

Of the various ideological streams that currently inspire and provoke political violence and terrorism in South Asia, the most destabilizing and lethal, and the one with the greatest extra-regional impact, is Islamist terrorism. A multiplicity of sub-sets and a complex, sometimes conflicting scheme of inter-linkages, has been documented in connection with the extended range of Islamist terrorist groups operating in the region.

Various shades of radical political Islam colour, indeed define, the Pakistani identity and nation, even as the country is positioned at the heart of contemporary Islamist terrorism. Extremist Islam is, and has long been, the state’s principal tool of internal political mobilisation and of external projection in an extraordinary and audacious enterprise of strategic overextension. Crucially, the footprint of almost every major act of international Islamist terrorism, for some time before 9/11 and continuously thereafter, invariably passes through Pakistan. After 9/11, the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan, and the stark choice given to the Pakistani leadership, the dynamics of the Islamist terrorist enterprise in South Asia have undergone dramatic adaptive adjustments and modifications. Essentially, however, this dynamic, its underlying ideologies, and its motivational and institutional structures, remain intact.

There is strong and cumulative evidence that the Pakistani power elite, located in the regressive military-mullah-feudal combine, is yet to abandon terrorism as a tactical and strategic tool to secure what it perceives as the country’s quest for ‘strategic depth’ in the region. This remains the case despite the increasing ‘blowback’ of Islamist terrorist violence within the country, and the progressive erosion of the Army’s status and control in expanding areas of the country. While the Pakistani Army has taken selective action against particular groups of Islamist terrorists – particularly those who have turned against the state, who have attacked President Musharraf and senior Army and Government functionaries, who have engaged in sectarian terrorism within the country, or who are targeted specifically on behalf of, and under pressure from, the US – it is the case that Pakistan continues to support and encourage the activities of a wide range of terrorist and Islamist extremist organisations. This is particularly the case with organisations that are active in Afghanistan – including remnants of the Taliban – and in India.

Despite cosmetic policy changes and some tokenism – including formal bans on a number of terrorist organisations – many prominent Islamist terrorist organisations continue to operate with a high measure of freedom in and from Pakistan.

Islamabad Seeking to tone down the war hysteria, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has said that Pakistan does not want a conflict with India and is determined to foil the designs of ‘non-state actors’ to use the country's soil to indulge in terrorism anywhere. Gilani said Pakistan wants ‘excellent’ relations with India even as he asked the international community to persuade New Delhi to defuse the current tensions.

"We understand India's pain as we are also affected by terrorism," he said. "Pakistan is a responsible country and is engaged in the war on terror. We don't want terrorist attacks anywhere in the world, including India."

Gilani said his country was ready to share intelligence with India. "We don't want terrorism in any form to be encouraged.”

Gilani said his government is determined to foil the designs of ‘non-state actors’ and elements opposed to stability and the ideals of Benazir Bhutto and her father Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

At the same time, Gilani said Pakistan armed forces know how to defend the country in the event of any aggression.

"I want to tell the world that as a responsible nation, we don't want war but if war is imposed on us, the people, the leadership and the armed forces know how to defend the country," he said in his third such assertions in as many days.

"Nobody should have any mistaken notions about this," Gilani said after offering prayers at the mausoleum of slain former Premier Benazir Bhutto at Garhi Khuda Baksh in Sindh province.

The Premier also urged the world community ‘to convince India to defuse the situation (prevailing) at the moment.’

Pak blast: 'India not informed about Indian's arrest'

Islamabad India has not been informed about the reported arrest of an alleged national of the country in connection with a car bomb attack in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore, a senior official of its mission in Islamabad on Thursday."We have not been informed in any manner by the Pakistani authorities about the arrest of any Indian citizen in Lahore. All we have seen are the media reports in this regard," the official of the Indian High Commission said.

TV news channels reported on Wednesday night that an alleged Indian national had been arrested in connection with the car bomb blast in a government officers' residential complex in Lahore earlier in the day, which killed a woman and injured four persons.

The claim comes amid mounting tensions between India and Pakistan in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attacks blamed on the Pakistan-based elements, including the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT).

While some channels identified the arrested man as Satish Anand Shukla, others gave his name as Satish Anand Sharma. They quoted Pakistani police and intelligence sources as claiming that the man was a resident of Kolkata and had purportedly served in the Indian High Commission in London for over three years.

The Pakistani sources told the TV channels that the man had initially identified himself as Munir.

There was also confusion as to whether the man was arrested alone or with others. Geo News channel reported he was arrested with two other persons.

The local TV channels quoting the sources also claimed that three fake Pakistani national identity cards, three letters, explosive materials and "other devices" were recovered from the arrested man.

Geo News quoted intelligence sources as saying that the man was arrested after his phone calls were traced and tapped.

The channels claimed the man reportedly told police that three of his accomplices were also in Pakistan and that they plotting to carry out attacks on Christians on the eve of Christmas in Punjab province.

This is probably the first instance of Pakistani authorities making an arrest in connection with a bomb attack on the day the incident occurred. Pakistan witnessed nearly 70 suicide bomb attacks last year and over 50 this year but there have been no instances of any arrest being made immediately after these incidents.

Pak media welcomes Indian PM's 'no war' statement

Islamabad The Pakistani media on Thursday welcomed Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's declaration that there was 'no question of war', as one top analyst underlined that it is encouraging that Islamabad and New Delhi are keeping diplomatic channels open."Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's statement on Tuesday that there is 'no question of war' between the two neighbours will have allayed some of the fears that the tension on our eastern border may spiral out of control," the Dawn daily said on Thursday.

In an editorial headlined 'The right response', the Dawn said the ‘with chest-thumping bravado still evident in some quarters on both sides of the border, statements designed to reduce the tension are a welcome sign of responsible statesmanship’.

According to the Daily Times, the Indian premier has 'trimmed the sails' of Indian response "probably after being put off" by the Hardline adopted by External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee, who had threatened unilateral action if Pakistan did not hand over the terrorists New Delhi had demanded.

Noted Pakistani analyst Talat Masood said even as India has been intensifying diplomatic and military pressure on Pakistan since the Mumbai attacks, "it is encouraging that Islamabad and New Delhi are keeping diplomatic channels open".

"Talks should continue to manage the crisis and put the peace process back on track," he said.

Holding that the threat of war "unleashes forces that do not lend themselves to any discipline", Daily Times said: "Neither the threatening state nor the one that is threatened ultimately knows how to put the genie back in the bottle once it is let out."

"This is the moment for India and Pakistan to cooperate and sincerely investigate the Mumbai attack and follow up with steps that put an end to a dark chapter of hostility that has undermined all efforts at normalisation of relations for a decade," the Daily Times said in an editorial 'Cooperate, give proof'.

The Dawn said that "an honest appraisal of the Mumbai aftermath would reveal a missed opportunity so far in Pakistan".

The Mumbai attacks were an "escalation in tactics" by terrorists to put pressure on the Pakistan-India peace process. "With the composite dialogue put on hold by India, the terrorists have already partially achieved their goal," the Dawn said.

It warned that even as the militants went for "India's economic jugular", "what's to stop them from upping the ante in Pakistani cities next?"

"Unfortunately, Indian pressure makes Pakistanis forget the real problem,' Dawn said, pointing to what the British journal The Economist had written on the subject: 'If Pakistan's leaders had ever united against Islamist militancy as they have against India over the past three weeks, their country would not be the violent mess that it is.'

"Tough words for us to swallow perhaps, but nevertheless true," Dawn said.

Masood wrote in the Daily Times that "In all probability, tensions will not be allowed boil over as both governments realise the horrendous consequences of escalation in a nuclear environment. Besides, India is set on an upward economic curve, and its economy would receive a serious setback".

Another analyst Nasim Zehra said India "needs to adopt a more constructive attitude in dealing with the post-Mumbai crisis". "There is no international 'browbeating' route that will yield any results for India," she wrote in an article in The News.

INDUS-SARASVATI CIVILIZATION

At least three different ethnic types: Austro-Asians, earliest peoples related to Australian aborigines; Dravidians, the people that the Aryans encountered; and the Aryans themselves. This divides up into three different language types, too, with the Northern Indian languages derived from Sanskrit and the Southern languages having Dravidian roots.

Indus river called Sindhu (a river goddess) in Sanskrit. Persians could not pronounce initial "S," so it therefore became "Hindu."

Why did the first great civilizations spring up in some of the driest areas of the world? Not the Mississippi, Amazon, or Danube river valleys, where the sod could not be plowed, but the river systems were the land did not have to be cleared. Alluvial soil easier to plow and very fertile.

Indus cities thrived from ca. 3000 to 2000 BCE and went into slow decline after that time. Two great cities (Mohenjo Daro and Harappa) sprang seemingly from nowhere, fully planned and functional, even more rationally planned than Mesopotamia or Egypt (contrast irregular streets of Babylon. Excellent plumbing and evidence of municipal control over the drainage. City blocks 200 yards by 400 yards. Indoor showers and drains. Unimaginative but well-designed and sturdy structures. Well built and comparatively spacious housing for workers and slaves. Language still has yet to be deciphered; some scholars discern a similarity with Polynesian languages (specifically Easter Island!). Not much art except for assorted seals.

Agriculture central. Surpluses to support city. Grain and cotton; famous for latter. The harrow only, because the plow was not needed in the soft soil. Some animals domesticated, but not elephant or horse. No irrigation. Some evidence of dam building to flood areas. Did not have iron and mediocre metallurgy (bronze only). Did not penetrate jungle for that very reason. Very poor weapons. No military fortresses, etc. No swords. The people seemed to be extremely conservative; they did not pick up new things even though there is much evidence of trade with Mesopotamia and Persia.

Religion: mother goddess, fertility, etc. Great communal bath at Mohenjo Daro. Definitely for religious purposes. Temple prostitutes. Common also in Babylon. Female figurines and the horned gods with erect penis. Phallus worship. Aryans called them "dark," "phallus-worshiping," "foul-mouthed," and "godless." Horned-god as "proto-Shiva" sitting in the lotus position. Lord of the Forest (Vanaspati) and Beasts (Pashupati). Proto-Venus fertility goddess. The humped-backed bull, but not the sacred cow.

Seals with what looks like a priest but there is no evidence that they had any great control.http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/306/prearyan.htm

March of the Titans

A history of the WHITEs

Chapter 5: Born of the Black Sea - The Indo-European Invasions

PART IV - THE ARYANS IN AFGHANISTAN AND INDIAARYANA - THE ARYAN ORIGIN OF AFGHANISTAN

Around the year 2000 BC, originating in the Caucasus, a sun worshipping Indo-European tribe calling themselves Aryans, using a language known as Sanskrit, invaded central Asia and occupied territory as far as the north of India. These invaders were what became known as the original Aryans.

In fact, all of those countries spanning their age of conquest bear names directly related to them - India, Iran, Iraq are all corruptions of the original word "Aryan". (Far off distant racial cousins of the Aryans went west, penetrating as far as Ireland, giving the name "Eire" to that land - also a derivative of the word Aryan).

ARYANA - THE ARYAN ORIGIN OF AFGHANISTAN

Around the year 2000 BC, originating in the Caucasus, a sun worshipping Indo-European tribe calling themselves Aryans, using a language known as Sanskrit, invaded central Asia and occupied territory as far as the north of India. These invaders were what became known as the original Aryans.

In fact, all of those countries spanning their age of conquest bear names directly related to them - India, Iran, Iraq are all corruptions of the original word "Aryan". (Far off distant racial cousins of the Aryans went west, penetrating as far as Ireland, giving the name "Eire" to that land - also a derivative of the word Aryan).

http://www.white-history.com/hwr5c.htm

THE PREBUDDHIST BACKGROUND

We are going to begin today with a consideration of the pre-buddhist situation in India. Normally Buddhist studies courses begin with a study of the life of the Buddha. We are going to begin before the life of the Buddha. Personally I feel this is quite important as I feel it helps one to understand the life and teachings of the Buddha in their broader historical and conceptual context and to understand and appreciate better the nature of Buddhism and perhaps Indian thought as a whole.

I do not know how many of you have visited India. We have in the North of India two great rivers — one is the Ganges and the other is the Yamuna. These two great rivers have separate sources in the Himalayas and they flow separately for a good proportion of their lengths. They unite in the north eastern region of India. From there they flow on together to the Bay of Bengal. In a way the geography of these two great rivers is a symbol of the origin and development of Indian religion, philosophy and thought because in Indian religion too we have two great rivers which were originally quite distinct and had separate origins and which for a considerable length of time were separate but which at a certain point of time merged and flowed on united right to the present day. Perhaps as I go into the prebuddhist history of India, we can keep in mind the image of these two rivers originally separate and at a certain point merging and flowing together to the sea.

When we look at the very early history of India, we find that there existed in the 3rd Millennium B.C. a very highly developed civilization in the Indian subcontinent. This civilization is as old as those which are called the cradles of human culture, civilizations like those of Egypt and Babylon. This civilization existed approximately between the year 2800 B.C. and 1800 B.C. It was known as the Indus Valley Civilization or it is sometimes called the Harappa Civilization, and it extended from what is now Western Pakistan, south to a point which is near Bombay and eastward to a point which is in the neighborhood of what is now Simla in the foothills of the Himalayas. If you see a map of India, you will realize that this is a very considerable extent. Not only was this civilization stable for a thousand years, it was also a very highly developed civilization both materially and spiritually. Materially the civilization was an agrarian one. They were skilled in irrigation and the planning of towns. In addition, they had a very highly developed spiritual culture. This is clear from the archaeological evidence that has been discovered at Mohenjodaro and Harappa. There is also evidence of the fact that they were literate. They had developed a script which unfortunately we are not able to decipher.

The peaceful life of this civilization was unfortunately interrupted in about the year 1800 or 1500 B.C. by an invasion that came from the North West. The invading people were known as the Aryans and this is a term that designated a people of Eastern Europe. The origin of the Aryans was in the grassy region extending from Poland to Western Russia. The Aryans were very different from the people of the Indus Valley Civilization because they were generally nomadic and pastoral. They did not have a highly developed urban civilization. They were a warlike expanding pioneer civilization that lived in large part from the spoils and plunder that they gathered from the peoples they conquered in the course of their migration. When the Aryans arrived in India, they very quickly destroyed the Indus Valley Civilization. The Indus Valley Civilization succumbed very quickly to the military might of the Aryans. What existed in India after the invasion was an Aryan dominated civilization.

Here we have a brief outline of the facts regarding the early history of India. But let us look at the religious outlook of the people of the Indus Valley Civilization and the Aryan Civilization which is of particular interest to us. The Indus Valley Civilization had a script which we are unfortunately unable to decipher. But our information regarding the nature of this civilization is from two sources, first from the archaeological discoveries at the sites of Mohenjodaro and Harappa and second from the records of the Aryans who described the religious behaviour and beliefs of the people they conquered. From the archaeological evidence we find a number of symbols that are of religious significance, that are special to Buddhism: the symbols of the Bodhi tree and animals such as the elephant and deer. Perhaps most importantly there have been discovered several images of figures sitting in cross-legged postures with their hands resting on their knees, with their eyes narrowed, half-closed quite evidently in postures of meditation. These archaeological findings have been studied by eminent scholars and the conclusion is that we can quite definitely trace the origin and practice of meditation to the Indus Valley Civilization. When we look at the descriptions of the religion of the Indus Valley Civilization from the writings of the Aryans - the Vedas - we find the figure of a wandering ascetic frequently mentioned. We find that they practised meditation, that they were celibate, that they observed an austere life, that they were sometimes naked or clothed in most simple garments, that they wandered about homeless and that they taught in the way beyond birth and death. If we put together the evidence of the archaeological findings and the evidence of Aryan literature, we find that there emerges a picture of the religion of the people of the Indus Valley Civilization in which there are several important elements. First of all, meditation or mental concentration; secondly renunciation, abandoning the household life, living the life of a wandering ascetic; thirdly that we have a conception of rebirth over a long series of lives; fourthly we have a conception of moral responsibility beyond this life, the notion of karma; and lastly we have a goal of religious life, a goal of liberation. These are the salient features of the religion of the very earliest Indian Civilization.

By contrast, and it would be hard to find two religious views that are more different, let us look at the religion of the Aryans. Here we find it much easier to construct a picture because we have a complete literature with regard to their religion. When the Aryans came to India, they had a religion which was totally secular. They were an expanding pioneering society. There are many close parallels between the Aryan religion and the religion of the Greeks. If you have come across the description of the Greek pantheon you will find striking similarities between their pantheon and the Aryan pantheon. You will find in the Aryan faith a number of gods who are personifications of natural phenomena. We have Indra for instance who was the God of Lightning and the Thunderstorm personifying power, we have Agni the God of Fire, and Varuna the God of Water. We have a religious set-up in which the priest is the most important figure, while in the Indus Valley Civilization the ascetic was the most important figure. In the Indus Valley Civilization renunciation was the ideal of religious life, while in the Aryan religion the ideal state is the householder state. In the Indus Valley Civilization we have a rejection of sons and offspring, while in the Aryan religion sons are the highest good. While in the Indus Valley Civilization we have the practice of meditation, in the Aryan religion we have the practice of sacrifice - sacrifice was an important means of communication with the gods, of achieving victories in battles, of gaining offspring, of going to heaven. While in the Indus Valley Civilization we have belief in the Law of Karma, and rebirth, in the Aryan Civilization we have no conception of rebirth. Just as in the Indus Valley Civilization we have the notion of moral responsibility extending over a series of lives, in the Aryan Civilization we have no such notion. In fact the highest ideal was loyalty, those values that contributed to the power of the community. Finally while in the Indus Valley Civilization we have liberation as the goal of religious life, in the Aryan Civilization we have heaven as the goal of religious life. The idea that they had of heaven was a heaven modelled upon a perfected version of this life. So if we want to sum up the differences between the religions of these two civilizations, we can say that on the one hand the Indus Valley Civilization stresses renunciation, meditation, rebirth, karma, the goal of liberation; on the other hand the Aryan religion stresses this life, material well-being, wealth, power, fame and sacrifices as means of achieving these goals. It would be hard to find a set of more diametrically opposed religious attitudes. In addition, there are two more important elements of Aryan religion that we ought to recall caste: the division of society into social strata; and belief in the authority of the revealed scriptures, the Vedas. These two elements were not present in the Indus Valley Civilization.

The history of Indian religion from 1500 B.C. up to 600 or 500 B.C., the time of the Buddha, the history of those 1000 years in India is a history of gradual interaction between these two totally opposed religious views. As the Aryans gradually spread and settled across the gigantic Indian subcontinent, as their pioneering exploits diminished, gradually these two totally opposed religious views began to influence, interact and merge with each other. This is the merging I had in mind when I talked about the merging of the two great rivers. Consequently by the time of the Buddha, we have a very heterogeneous religious scene. We can understand this clearly if we look at some of the facts regarding the life of the Buddha. For instance, we find that when the Buddha was born, two groups of people made prophecies regarding His future greatness. The first prophecy was made by Asita. Asita was a hermit, who lived in the mountains and yet sources tell us that he was a Brahmin, that he belonged to the priestly class. This in itself is already evidence of the interaction of the two traditions. In the Buddha’s time, Brahmins had begun to go forth as hermits. This was unheard of a thousand years before. A little later, we are told that 108 Brahmins were invited to the naming ceremony. Here we have examples of priests who had not renounced the household life, an example of an institution that properly and originally belonged to the Aryan Civilization.

How is it that the two traditions - the Indus Valley tradition and the Aryan tradition, initially so different were able to merge? I think the answer to this lies in the dramatic changes which took place in the life of the Indian people between the 2nd Millennium B.C. and the time of the Buddha. The Aryan expansion came to an end when they had conquered the plains of India. This end of expansion brought about many social, economic and political changes. In the first place, the tribal political society evolved into the institution of the territorial state so that no longer do you have a tribe with a very close personal set of loyalties. You have now a territorial state where many people of various tribes exist together. The kingdom of Magadha ruled by Bimbisara in the time of the Buddha is an example of an emerging territorial state. Secondly, you have this nomadic pastoral lifestyle gradually changed into a more urbanized agricultural settled lifestyle so that the people were now living in urban centres, and were removed from the natural forces that had been personified in the gods. Economically, commerce became important. So while in the early days of the Aryan Civilization the priests and warriors were the most important figures - the priest because he communicated with the gods, the warrior because he waged wars against the enemy and brought spoils into the community - now the merchants became increasingly important. We can see this in the days of the Buddha, the famous disciples who were merchants - Anathapindika to name only one. These social, economic and political changes contributed to an openness on the part of the Aryans to accept the religious ideas of the Indus Valley Civilization. While the Aryans conquered the Indus Valley people militarily, the subsequent 1000 to 2000 years saw them coming increasingly under the influence of ideas taken from the Indus Valley Civilization. So that by the first few centuries of the Common Era, the distinction between the Aryan tradition and the Indus Valley tradition became more and more difficult to draw. In fact, this fact is at the bottom of the misconception when it is said that Buddhism is a protest against Hinduism, or that Buddhism is a branch of Hinduism.

In Buddhism we have a religion which draws most of its inspiration from the Indus Valley religion, the ideas of renunciation, meditation, karma and rebirth, ultimate liberation - ideas which were important to the Indus Valley Civilization. The Buddha Himself indicated the Indus Valley origins of His tradition when He said that the path which He taught was an ancient path and the goal to which He pointed to was an ancient goal. We also have a Buddhist belief in six Buddhas prior to the Buddha Shakyamuni within this aeon. All these point to a continuity between the tradition of the Indus Valley Civilization and the teachings of the Buddha. If we look at Buddhism and Hinduism we will find a greater or lesser proportion of elements taken from either of the two traditions of the Indus Valley Civilization and Aryan Civilization. For instance, if we look at Buddhism, the greater proportion was taken from the Indus Valley Civilization religion, a lesser proportion from the Aryan tradition. That is why we find mention of the Aryan gods in Buddhist scripture, though their role is peripheral, an example of an Aryan element in the Buddhism tradition. On the other hand, if we look at some schools of Hinduism, we find a greater proportion of elements taken from the Aryan tradition and a lesser proportion from the Indus Valley Civilization. We find caste emphasized, the authority of the revealed scripture of the Aryans - the Vedas - emphasized and sacrifices emphasized. Alongside, we find a place made for renunciation, meditation, karma and rebirth.

http://www.buddhanet.net/fundbud2.htm

Indo-Aryans - pre-Vedic Indo-Aryans: Encyclopedia II - Indo-Aryans - pre-Vedic Indo-AryansThe separation of Indo-Aryans proper from Proto-Indo-Iranians is commonly dated, on linguistic grounds, to roughly 1800 BC. The Nuristani languages probably split in such early times, and are either classified as remote Indo-Aryan dialects, or as an independent branch of Indo-Iranian. It is believed that by 1500 BC, Indo-Aryans had reached Assyria in the west and the Punjab in the east. The spread of Indo-Aryan languages has been connected with the spread of the chariot in the first half of the second millennium BC. Some scholars trac ...

Subject: “The second stage of Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation which includes privatisation of higher and professional education, Conversion of retail marketing into global marketing, Centralisation of retail market into private hands is a conspiracy to nullify and thereby sabotage the constitutional rights of the indigenous people ( Mulnivasi Bahujan Samaj) of India so as to force slavery on them.” From last year on 16th April at ShivajiPark, Mumbai, we started organising the joint celebrations of our great leaders. We are organizing these joint celebrations of the birthdays of our great leaders at Ahmedabad on a national level this year.

On this day we are discussing this issue, “The second stage of Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation which includes privatisation of higher and professional education, Conversion of retail marketing into global marketing, Centralisation of retail market into private hands is a conspiracy to nullify and thereby sabotage the constitutional rights of the indigenous people ( Mulnivasi Bahujan Samaj) of India so as to force slavery on them.” Rashtriya Mulnivasi Sangh will organize 15000 meetings till the end of this December to highlight this issue. There will be a nation wide awakening through such programmes.We must seriously understand and comprehend this issue. LPG stands for Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation. This programme of LPG was started by the Congress Party in 1990 and the Congress Party takes the credit of this programe. We too give credit of the implementation of the programme of LPG to the Congress . The Bharatiya Janata Party is an accomplice of the Congress Party and they together started implementing this programme of LPG. At that time i.e. in 1990 Narsimha Rao was the Prime Minisiter and Manmohan Singh was the Finance Minister. Today Manmohan Singh is the Prime Minister. The Central Government has implemented aggressively this programme of LPG for the last 17 years.

Even all the state governments have become excited and enthusisastic and are looking forward to implement this programme of LPG. Thus both the BJP and the Congress are aggressively implementing this programme of LPG. Even the Communists are taking the initiative in the implementation of LPG.

What have been the consequences of LPG on Mulnivasi Bahujan Samaj? The policy of LPG has been implemented for the last 17 years but the Mulnivasi Bahujan Samaj is ignorant of the adverse effects of LPG.The Government does not want to provide information about the adverse effects of the policy of LPG. In fact they want to hide this information from the Mulnivasi Bahujan Samaj. There is a conspiracy behind all this. We want to awaken the people regarding all this and make them aware of this conspiracy and then organize them.The Central Government started implementing the policy of LPG in Government Sectors and Public Undertaking Sectors. The BJP, the Communists and the Congress together have started privatization in the Government and the Public Undertaking Sectors. The Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes, the Other Backward Classes and the indigenous Converted Minorities have reserved seats in the Government sectors and the Public Undertaking Sectors. There are about 2 Crore government posts and atleast 1 crore of these posts would have been occupied by the persons amongst the SCs, the STs, the OBCs and the indigenous converted Minorities. If we were to consider that an average family consists of 5 members then atleast 5 crore people were directly dependent and could have made their living on these government posts.

But as the programme of LPG is being aggressively implemented Reservation for the SCs, the STs, the OBCs and the indigenous converted Minorities in the Government Bureaucracy and Public Undertaking Sectors has become practically null and void. There may be the provision for reservation in our Indian Constitution but it exists now only on paper. Practically the reservation policy has become completely null.

There has been a complete ban on Recruitment for the last 12-13 years. If there is recruitment there will be reservation. If there is no recruitment there will be no Reservation.

Educated people amongst the Mulnivasi Bahujan Samaj who read news and watch television do not have any information. Those who need to know and be informed are completely ignorant. If the educated people from amongst the indigenous people are ignorant who will educate the illiterate people.

Kumbhkaran was maligned in Ramayana because he used to sleep for 6 months at a stretch. Our people are Grand grandfathers of Kumbhkaran as they have been sleeping for 17 long years.

Thus the first adverse effect of LPG was that Reservation was nullified.The policy of Reservation guaranteed reserved posts and the availability of these jobs provided inspiration and motivation to the people in the villages who starved themselves but educated their children so that their children could aspire to occupy those Government posts. But now as the policy of Reservation has become null, this inspiration and motivation no longer exists. Even the motivation for learning and getting educated has died down.Lack of education will lead to lack of development of the brains of our people. Our people wouldn’t be able to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong. They will not be able to reason, analyze and make decisions.

You know that an animal does not have the ability to reason, analyze and make decisions. The ruling castes want to push our people down to the level of animals. LPG is the program to make animals of our people. Even our educated people do not have this information. Who will educate the illiterate?

The implementation of the policy of LPG has forced 60 crore people in India below the Poverty Line. One new class has emerged amongst these 60 crore people. This is the class of 25 crore people who have been forced below the Starvation Line.The Ruling Castes use the Hindi word ‘Kuposhan’ for the English word ‘Starvation’. Our people do not understand the Hindi word Kuposhan.They think that Kuposhan is some sort of a disease. But in ordinary Hindi kuposhan means Bhookmari. The Godowns of the Food Corporation of India are full of every kind of grain. But this food is not sent to the starving population of India. They Government say they do not have money to send food to the starving people of India. But the Government allocated 400 crores to the Indian Space Research Organisation to plan a mission to the Moon. The Government says it has no money for the poor.This is mass slaughter by forcing starvation on the Mulnivasi Bahujan Samaj. There is not a single line about this catastrophe in the National Newspaper. Thus our people do not have any information regarding all this.

The wedding ceremony of Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachhan was highlighted daily in these news channel and newspapers. But the same media does not print a single line about the starvation deaths in our country. We see that the head of a family commits suicide by consuming poison. He even poisons his own family members. They report that investigation is in progress. But I say is there any need for investigation. Just go and look into the utensils kept in the kitchen. Our people blame it on their fate. Our people say it is the writ of the Brahma. But it is the writ of the Brahmins.

Nehru was the first Prime Minister of India. The first Five Year Plan planned a budget of 3700 crores. In Sonia Gandhi’s time i.e today the total expenditure of just one year is about 5 lac 1000 crores rupees. If Sonia Gandhi wishes she could remove the starvation and poverty of our people in just 5 years. If A.B.Vajpayee wishes he could do the same. If the Brahmins who plan the budget of India wish then they could end this starvation and poverty of our people. But they simply do not want to allocate any budget for eradication of poverty and starvation of our people. It simply means that our poverty and starvation is the writ of the Brahmins.

We need to seriously think of this and act accordingly. Sooner or later those who are not below the poverty line will be forced below the poverty line or even the starvation line. This is a Mass-Slaughter programme being implemented by the Government. These were the catastrophic consequences of the first stage of Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation.

The adverse consequences of the policy of LPG should have made the government to terminate this policy immediately. But they knowingly started implementing the 2nd stage this programme of LPG.The 2nd stage of LPG includes:1) Creation of SEZ i.e. Special Economic Zones.2) Absolute Privatization of Higher and Professional Education3) Conversion of Retail market into Global market to centralize and monopolize retail market into private hands.

These are dangerous programmes which spell impending doom for the future of the Mulnivasi Bahujan Samaj. These three programmes are being implemented on a large scale.

Do you know how a bill is passed? First it is put up for discussion in the Rajya Sabha, then in the Lok Sabha and then the President gives his approval. After all this procedure it is finally published in the gazette.But without any discussion this bill (SEZ) was passed in the RajyaSabhaand the LokSabha. If the bill would have been discussed, the people of India would have known about the adverse consequences of SEZ. This bill was passed without discussion. Any bill which is passed without discussion is absolutely Unconstitutional. The President shouldn’t have given his approval to this undiscussed bill and unconstitutional bill. But the President gave his approval. Even the Supreme Court has not opposed this unconstitutional bill. All of them are in this Conspiracy. We need to understand this.They call Mr.Kalam, the President, a true Rashtrawadi (Nationalist). Is he a fool or a donkey that he does not understand simple things? He has signed on a bill which was not discussed in the Parliament. He could have asked them to discuss the Bill. The Constitution of India has bestowed such powers on the President. But the President didn’t exercise any of his power. He should have but he didn’t. Thus they are all in this conspiracy.

It is written in the bill that for a Special Economic Zone minimum 2000 hectares i.e. 4500 acres of land and maximum 35000 hectares i.e. 80000 acres to 1,00,000 acres of land must be allocated.

There was widespread unrest in West Bengal over this land acquisition. Due to this growing unrest the Government says that the land allotment to SEZ will be 1000 acre minimum to 10,000 acres maximum. But this latest statement has been issued to befool the people. It has been done to deflate the growing opposition of the people. Factually such an order has not been passed. It is a huge conspiracy.They are betraying this country. Therefore they cannot be trusted at all.

It is mentioned in the bill that only 10% of land allotted to SEZ will be used for development of industries. The rest i.e. 90% of the land will be used for developing Real Estate. Real Estate means Handling of the land to Big Builders so that they could build multi-storey buildings.

If only 10% of land will be used for industry then only 10% of the total land allocated for SEZ must be actually allotted. But in reality 1 lac acres land is being allotted.

Thus through a simple bill the government along with the state governments wants to buy agricultural land from farmers at a cheap rate and sell it even more cheaply to capitalists.

Before develop of Real Estate on the SEZ land, one acre of agricultural land will normally cost 1, 00,000 rupees.After development into Real Estate the same land will cost 10 crore rupees.1 lakh acres of Real Estate land will cost 1, 00,000 * 1, 00,000,000 rupees. Thus the land of the Mulnivasi Bahujan Samaj is being forcibly bought by the government to sell it cheaply to the Capitalists. This is nothing but a huge Land Scam.

The Government says that the Capitalist will use his own money to develop the land. But in reality the capitalist will earn 1, 00,000*1, 00,000,000 rupees and will only invest 1%-2% of what he earns. Thus this is land scam.Just imagine of what huge proportion this land scam really is?

The Government has proposed a tax exemption of 2, 00,000*1, 000* 10,000,000 (2 lakh1000 crores) rupees annually for SEZs.There will not be Custom Tax, production tax, sales tax, etcThere will not be any duty on raw material imported. There will be no duty on finished goods exported. There will be complete tax exemption for 15 years. Thus the total tax exemption will be 15*2, 00,000*1, 000*10, 000,000=30 lacs 1000 crore rupees. This is nothing but Tax evasion with the help of a simple bill and by making a law. By simply passing such a bill they want to put all this money into the pockets of the industrialists. Industrialists like Tata, Birla have become great by looting India’s wealth. They say that we do not have merit. But are they becoming millionaires, billionaires by their merit or by looting the country’s wealth? Plundering the country’s wealth is not a sign of being meritorious. Those who loot and plunder the country’s wealth are called Dacoits. Everywhere in the world such people are called as Dacoits. This is carried in a joint way (check)

If this amount (30 lac 1000 crore rupees) goes into the government treasury instead of going into the Industrialists’ pockets then it could be spent on our peoples’ health, education etc. But this money will now go into the Industrialists’ pockets. The government wants to put all this money into the Industrialists’ pockets. This is nothing but TAX SCAM.Harshad Mehta who laundered 1000 crores died of blood pressure and heart attack. But these people have sound hearts and even their blood pressure is normal.This is a planned conspiracy.

The bill of SEZ says that the SEZ’s will be foreign territories. It says that the SEZ will be deemed to be a foreign territory. Why do they say that the SEZ’s will be foreign territories? Does our constitution apply to Nepal, Bangladesh or Pakistan? The answer is no simply because Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan are foreign territories. The bill simply says that the constitution will not be applicable in SEZ’s. No Indian law can be enforced in SEZ’s. No person will be allowed to even enter these SEZ’s without permission and a pass. I had to apply for a visa before going to England. I enquired what exactly does visa mean. They said it is an entry pass. If you want to enter into Ambani’s SEZ you will have to procure an entry pass. Thus an Indian citizen will have to procure an entry pass to enter a SEZ as it will be a foreign territory.

If the constitution is not applicable to SEZ, then it is nothing but betrayal of the constitution. Thus land is being brought at throwaway prices and is being converted into foreign territories. This is betrayal of the nation. If the constitution is not applicable then all the fundamental rights enshrined in the constitution become null. Those who do not have fundamental rights are called as slaves. Slaves do not have fundamental rights. Those people who will live in SEZ’s will be nothing but slaves. They will be made slaves. They won’t have any rights. They can’t go to the High Court and the Supreme Court because SEZ’s will not be in the jurisdiction of these courts. These SEZ’s will be called as Ambani Region, Tata Region, Mahindra Region etc and the Industrialists who own these regions will say that SEZ’s is a foreign territory and the constitution of India is not applicable to any foreign territory. The Supreme Court and the High Court will not have any power to adjudicate on a case from a SEZ because SEZ will not be under their jurisdiction. Lawyers know that a case of Vadodara can be adjudicated upon in Vadodara but not in Ahmedabad. The Brahmin who wrote the draft of SEZ explicitly mentioned that SEZ will be a foreign territory so that it cannot be challenged in any Indian Court. Just imagine if all the territory of India is converted into SEZ, will the Indian Nation exist? Every region will be a foreign territory where the Indian constitution will not be applicable. Does the Parliament have a right to make such a law? The answer is definitely no.

The Constitution of India says that India is a sovereign country. There cannot be a nation without a nation. Thus SEZ is nothing but a dangerous conspiracy of unimaginable proportion.

The Bill of SEZ says that if any industrialist who invests in SEZ by taking loans from any foreign institutions goes bankrupt then all his loans will be cleared by the Indian government. The responsibility of clearing the loan will be the responsibility of the Indian Government. Now any scheming foreign or Indian Industrialist will invest in SEZ and then declare to have become a bankrupt. He will run away with all his money. But the Indian Government will have to clear his loans from the money that it collects as tax from us. The Indian Government is an accomplice in this conspiracy. Our MLA’s and MP’s are part of this conspiracy. They have sold themselves. These MLA’s, MP’s, Chief Ministers are all slaves who have sold themselves. Everything is being done against the law of the land and against the constitution of India. If this programme of Creation of SEZ’s was in the interest of the nation why was not it discussed in the Parliament? If SEZ’s were for the welfare of the nation why was not it discussed in the Parliament? They say that this programme is being implemented to transform India into a great nation. If this is true why was not it discussed in Parliament? If it would have been discussed in the parliament people would have come to know about it. But they wanted to hide the real motive. This clearly suggests that it is a huge conspiracy. There will be no Labour law in SEZ’s. A worker will have to work for 16 hours and will receive the salary of 8 hours. Our people do not know the difference between service and slavery. If you work for 8 hours and receive a salary for 8 hours’ work then it is service. But if you work for 16 hours and receive a salary for 8 hours’ work then it is slavery. Our Mulnivasi Bahujan Samaj is basically a labour class.

Thus SEZ is a programme to enslave the Mulnivasi Bahujan Samaj. It is a programme to make slaves of us and that too of the worst kind.

The next programme of the ruling castes is to absolutely privatize higher education and professional education. Sukhdeo Thorat, a scheduled caste person, from Amravati near Nagpur was made the chairman of the University Grants Commission. He was formerly a lecturer in the Jawaharlal Nehru University. The main work of UGC is to give grants to 250 Universities across India. The grants facilitate admissions of the students belonging to SC’s, ST’s and the OBC’s.

Now Arjun Singh has introduced a bill which seeks to amend some functions of the UGC and to make all universities completely autonomous. This bill is under discussion in the parliament, in the parliamentary committee. Autonomous universities will be completely free from Government regulations. No grants will be issued to universities from now on. Whatever kind of education these universities aim to provide, be it professional or higher education, they will be permitted to provide, by giving them the right to exact exorbitant fees. Thus the poor will be systematically debarred from getting professional education and higher education.The poor will be unable to seek admission to professional courses like Engineering, Medical, MBA etc as he will not have the capacity to pay 10-15 lakh rupees annually for such courses.

They have started a campaign named, “Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan”This campaign says that all children shall be educated till the 8th standard. Students shall be promoted from one standard to the following higher standard without conducting any sort of examination. In such way a student will be gradually promoted to standard eight. These students will not be able to write even their own names. Such will be the kind of education without examinations. Even a 8th standard pass student shall not be able to write his father’s name.

Exams are conducted for the development of Merit. A student has to necessarily study for the examinations which leads to development of merit in him. With this merit our people can compete with them. But this is not being allowed to happen.

In Maharashtra, in Marathi, we call this method of promoting students without subjecting them to examinations as, “Dhakkal Pass”.This will retard the development of the minds of our people. Our people will not be able to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong. They will not be able to think logically. They will not be able to compare and study. They will lack ability to analyse and assess things. They will not be able to form their own opinions. They will be incompetent to draw inferences and conclusions. Thus they will be totally incapacitated to make any decision. A leader is essentially a person who can make decisions.A leader is able to make his progress and his community’s as well.

They want to convert us into a herd of animals. Not many people are required to drive a herd of animals.I want to mention an incident regarding the ‘Rabbari-Bharwar’ community in Gujarat. Once a jeep driver who was carrying extra passengers was caught by a constable and brought before the Inspector. The driver explained that he was only carrying 9 passengers. The Inspector asked the constable how many passengers did the driver actually carried in his jeep. The constable replied that the jeep carried 15 passengers. The driver then explained that he was carrying only 9 passengers because the rest of the persons belonged to the ‘Rabbari-Bharwar’ community.

They do not even consider these people as passengers. Such is their plight!Can we expect the ruling castes even to consider these people as human beings? A ‘Rabbari-Bharwar’ drives a herd/flock of sheep and cattle. But now our people will be dumb driven cattle for the ruling castes.

By debarring us from getting Higher and Professional education they are planning absolute devastation of our people.

Most of the people employed in the retail sector in India belong the the OBC’s and the Muslims. 4 Crore people have got self-employment in the Retail Sector. The Government does not want to provide employment in the Government Sector and the Public Undertaking Sector. Even Self-Employment in the Retail Sector is being systematically ended. Big Malls and Outlets will slowly destroy whatever self employment our people had in the Retail sector. Now Ambani will sell ‘spinach’ in his Malls. He will send his trucks directly to the farms and purchase vegetables from the farmers. The trucks will carry those vegetables to the respective malls. Ordinary vegetable-sellers will not get any vegetables to sell in the market. They will lose their employment. Thus the Industrialists will takeover completely the Retail market of India. 4 crore people, mostly belonging to the Other Backward Classes and the Minorities will be directly affected and they will lose their work.Our future and our physical world will be controlled by the Industrialists. This is nothing but slavery.

Our Mulnivasi India will be plunged into the mire of slavery. It means that the first stage as well as the second stage of Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalization is a conspiracy to enslave the Mulnivasi Indians and Our Mulnivasi Bharat. These programmes are not being implemented to make India great but to enslave India. Our highly educated people such as IASs, IPSs, IRSs, Doctors, Engineers, and Lawyers etc say that it is not possible to oppose LPG.

In the Lok Sabha elections of 2004 ordinary people brought down the Government of Bharatiya Janata Party and Atal Bihari Vajpayee was brought down on the road. Just by the ordinary people of India!

Congress was brought to power but the ordinary people wanted a complete halt to Privatisation. But the Congress Party continued with Privatisation. In the recent elections to the 5 states Congress was completely defeated. After that elections took place in another three states in which Congress lost again. Now there are impending elections in Uttar Pradesh. Newspapers are already saying that Congress will be number 4 party in UP. Such is the miserable state of Congress before the UP elections! And such will be its plight even after the UP elections.

Ordinary people have brought them down on the roads. Ordinary people have shown that they have the capacity to oppose. But our educated people who have the required intellectual capacity say that it is not possible to oppose LPG! They are nothing but offspring of Eunuchs! Normally Eunuchs are not capable to produce children. Eunuchs are not capable of producing children but still these educated people (who say that it is not possible to oppose Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation) are the offspring of Eunuchs. It means that they are bastards. A bastard is a person who has two fathers.

Ordinary people opposed these programmes in Nandigram in West Bengal. Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, CM of W. Bengal was forced to take back his decision to create SEZ in Nandigram. The Central Government was forced to change its programme of SEZ.If people are awakened and prepared it is possible. This is a dangerous situation for the Mulnivasi Bahujan Samaj.It is possible to oppose all this. It is possible to fightback and repel this attack on the Mulnivasi Bahujan Samaj.Our forefathers and our leaders had created a Nation-wide Movement for our independence. But this movement was destroyed by Congress, Gandhi and the stooges of the Congress.

On this occasion we pledge to resurrect the movement of our leaders. To resurrect the movement of our leaders we need five types of means and resources- time, talent, money, labour and brains. All these have to be given to resurrect the movement. If you contribute these above mentioned resources you can resurrect the Nation-wide movement of our great leaders. That movement had given us constitutional rights and had removed us from the mire of slavery. That movement needs to be resurrected. We will organize such programmes in various regions and capitals of various states of this country. This will be nation-wide programme. We pledge to spread this movement in all the regions of India. A similar programme of state level will be held in Rajkot in Gujarat. We will utilize our full strength in Gujarat to organize this programme.

It is only a matter of time before Hamas and its Palestinian sympathizers are called to account for the death and destruction wrought by thousands of missiles they have fired into Israeli cities, towns and kibbutzim over the past three years.

On November 25th, TIME magazine reported that the Bush administration is in the process of establishing relations with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and has warned Israeli Prime Minister Olmert against resorting to any military action against it or Iran before he leaves office. If true, the US and Israel are on a collision course. Nations not only have the right, but the obligation to defend their citizenry and territory from attack. As such, it is only a matter of time before Hamas and its Palestinian sympathizers are called to account for the death and destruction wrought by thousands of missiles they have fired into Israeli cities, towns and kibbutzim over the past three years.

Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar noted recently: "We do not recognize the State of Israel or its right to control any of the land of Palestine. Palestine is holy Islamic land. Our national problem is not related only to the West Bank, Gaza, and al-Quds (Jerusalem) . . . but to Palestine, all [the territory of] Palestine." By that he meant Israel proper or what he terms "the Zionist entity."

Unfortunately, Zahar is not alone in this thinking. On Sunday, December 14th, one hundred and fifty thousand Hamas supporters gathered and cheered in Gaza City to mark the 21st anniversary of the Islamist movement's founding. This is consistent with a recent poll of Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza that asked: "Do you support or oppose suicide bombings against Israeli civilians?" Fifty-six percent (56%) said they support it. That poll paralleled the results of an earlier survey conducted jointly by Public Opinion Research of Israel and the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion. That survey found that only 13% of Palestinians agreed with the statement that "Hamas was a terrorist group"; 82% agreed that Hamas was a "freedom-fighting organization"; and a mere 10% believed that bombings targeting Israeli civilians in buses and restaurants could be classified as "acts of terrorism." Moreover, the world may have been appalled this year when students studying in a Jerusalem library were shot to death by a Palestinian terrorist, but the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research reports that 84% of Palestinians approved.

These attitudes suggest an enormous ethical and moral divide between Palestinian and Israeli cultures. What the Bush administration fails to understand is that Hamas didn't get elected by accident. It got elected because its very rationale for existence reflects the prevailing attitude within mainstream Palestinian society. For the Palestinians, terrorism is not a weapon borne of desperation but a strategic choice. If Hamas and its Palestinian supporters seek the annihilation of Israel, they had best understand the ultimate consequences of war.

Military historian Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institute writes: "Modern Western man is faced with (an) awful dilemma, from which he recoils: Real peace and successful reconstruction are in direct proportion to the degree to which an enemy is humiliatingly defeated and so acknowledges it – the aim being that he will come to feel that he cannot go on being what he has been." In effect, only after eradicating the reasons for which wars are fought – slavery, fascism, Nazism and Japanese militarism – can real peace and re-construction follow. That moment is reached when an enemy is rendered incapable and unwilling to continue the conflict. Only with absolute victory can an enemy's terror apparatus be dismantled; its leadership replaced, its capacity to wage further war be eliminated; its weapons seized; its militias hunted down; its propaganda machine terminated; its educational system reformed; its human and financial resources channeled back into massive social and economic reconstruction, its government and judiciary made transparent, its universities secularized, and its population prepared for a new and better future. If his historical analyses of war, victory and defeat are correct, neither Israel nor the US will be able to accommodate or moderate an enemy whose entire rationale for existence is its divinely-inspired mission to conquer Israel and compel its citizens to submit to Islam.

Faced with a choice between annihilation and survival, Israel will choose survival. Like ancient man, Israelis (just like the rest of us) are hardwired to survive, and will use their full arsenal when faced with the alternative of extinction. For post-modern children of the Enlightenment, the idea that we would ever have to descend into the primeval swamp to destroy our enemies to ensure our survival is disturbing. War is neither pleasant nor desirable, but in an environment where Palestinian suicide bombers are trained from infancy to hate Jews and are revered as "martyrs," where Palestinian children play soccer with the decapitated head of a fallen Israeli soldier and have an orgy in the blood of their Israeli victims, where Palestinian mothers celebrate the "martyrdom" of their children, and where Palestinians are taught a culture of death in their textbooks, schools and summer camps, in their mosques and marketplaces, in their radio and television programs, in their video games and on the Internet, war becomes necessary to eradicate the culture that breeds such pathologies.

Churchill, Eisenhower and Patton understood this. They understood that it would have been impossible to dismantle the Hitler Youth, the Nazi SS, the death camps and the cult of Aryan supremacy without the complete destruction of the Third Reich. Only such destruction permitted the re-birth of a new Germany from the ashes of World War II. The idea that a genocidal, messianic regime like Hamas can be bribed or cajoled into denying its rationale for existence is the height of folly and flies in the face of history.

Eventually, a point will be reached when Israel will be forced to act with or without America's blessing. Just as the creation of free and democratic societies in Germany and Japan after World War II necessitated a comprehensive purge of their pre-war political, economic, military, social and cultural infrastructures, including the re-education of their entire populations and the rebuilding of their societies over many years, so Palestinian society must undergo a profound upheaval followed by an equally profound metamorphosis that will sweep away the concept of "martyrdom" and religiously-inspired genocide and sow the seeds for a new tomorrow.

The "death cult" which is a recurring message on both Fatah-controlled PA TV and Hamas-controlled Al Aqsa TV must be extirpated from the Palestinian psyche. That will not be achieved by forcing the Israelis to concede Palestinian statehood to terrorists, relinquishing the Golan Heights to Syria, returning the Sheba'a Farms area to Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon, dividing Jerusalem, rectifying Israel's borders, or settling on a refugee compensation formula – at least, not in the first instance. Real peace will be achieved only after the Palestinians have been brought to the realization that their dream of conquering Israel is futile, and that whatever the future holds for them, it will be far better than the ravages of war they have brought upon themselves.

The US administration and the Europeans are wrong in believing that there is "no military solution" here. Multicultural tolerance and utopian pacifism do not work well against radical Islamists. Conflict-resolution theory and the success of the UN in convincing us that disagreements are not really the result of evil actions or incompatible worldviews, but simply misunderstandings that can be rectified through dialogue and reason will not resolve this problem. As we have seen in Mumbai, Islamists are violently affronted when Hindus, Jews, Buddhist or Christians are sovereign over a Muslim minority. Michael Ledeen of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies points out: "Peace cannot be accomplished simply because some visiting envoy, with or without an advanced degree in negotiating from the Harvard Business School, sits everyone down around a table so they can all reason together."

In the end, Israel will be forced to re-occupy Gaza and possibly the West Bank (in the post-Abbas era), and return to its pre-Oslo administration for the foreseeable future. A return to pre-Oslo would permit Palestinian society to be restructured and rebuilt until such time as a new generation of moderate Palestinian leaders can assume responsibility for the future of their nation. The Palestinians will eventually learn to reject violence not because it is politically ineffective, but because it is morally wrong. To achieve that level of understanding may take decades, but one thing is certain – only a society freed from the demons of its past can succeed. The scourge of "martyrdom" and the jihadist rationale that epitomizes Hamas must be eradicated from Palestinian society. Anything short of this merely prolongs Palestinian agony, delays Palestinian reconciliation and re-construction, sows the seeds for continuing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and renders a new Palestinian rebirth impossible.

Labels: Foreign Affairs: Israel-Palestine

Mark Silverberg is a foreign policy analyst with the Ariel Center for Policy Research (Israel) and the author of "The Quartermasters of Terror: Saudi Arabia and the Global Islamic Jihad."jfednepa@epix.netVisit their website at: http://www.marksilverberg.com

Read more articles by Mark Silverberg on IntellectualConservative.com

Responses to "The Final Reckoning"

what about the Hamas-like tactics instigated by the Israelis against the Palestinians? not to mention the hundreds years of oppression brought upon the Palestinians by the Israeli military? oh, sorry. i forgot that the Israelis are the only victims here…

Space, time and genesTo a historian of science, there is a remarkable similarity between the attitudes of theologians in Galileo’s time and of philologists and anthropologists in our own. They cannot accept the fact that the very foundation of their discipline—not just the Aryan invasion theory—has collapsed. Natural history and genetics have demolished their theories as well as their methods. And like Galileo’s adversaries, they too have chosen to resort to politics and propaganda, though the forces they invoke lack the authority of the Church in Galileo’s time.By Dr NS Rajaram

The Oxford geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer is more specific and also more emphatic, focusing on the M17 or the so-called ‘Caucasoid’ (politically correct for ‘Aryan’) genetic marker.

Population geneticists have identified two objects that carry genetic information that is passed on from generation to generation. They are the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and the Y-chromosome. mtDNA is inherited through the female line (passed on from mother to daughter) while the Y-chromosome is transmitted through the male line. There are individual quirks in these cells that are specific to regions like Africa, India, Southeast Asia and so forth. These are the genetic markers we look for. Mapping them allows us to study the possible origins of different population groups now inhabiting the globe. For example, we know that all humans living in the world today are descended from a relatively small African population because Africa contains almost all the genetic markers found in other parts of the world, but the reverse is not true.

Following more than a century of research in genetics, especially molecular genetics, it is becoming possible to trace the origins of different population groups in the world. It is important however to approach it with care because it has some pitfalls. In particular, since all humans living in the world today have more than 99 per cent of their genes in common, almost any two groups can be found to be genetically similar. Failing to recognise this has led to absurd conclusions like the claim that upper caste Indians are of European origin, who “imposed the oppressive caste system” on the indigenous population. (No ‘oppressor gene’ has been found.)

The error here lay in assigning biological causes to a man-made classification like caste. Nature, however, does not recognise man-made boundaries. Similar claims can be made for religion— finding a genetic basis for Christianity. Taking this a step further, one may identify Catholic genes, Protestant genes, and presumably even Mormon genes in Salt Lake City, Utah, the home of the Mormon Church, where the claim about genes and caste was first made.

Similarly impossible claims have been made about language, social habits and the like that can have no biological basis. The error consists in mistaking the phenotype for a purely inherited trait or genotype. In addition, some workers have tried to use genetics to justify their own pet beliefs and theories like the Aryan invasion. This has led to absurdities like one group claiming that only males migrated (more of which later) while another claimed only females did! Obviously both cannot be true, but both can be false.

After some initial hiccups, the definitive statement about the genetic composition of the Indian population was summarised as follows by researchers led by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza:

Taken together, these results show that Indian tribal and caste populations derive largely from the same genetic heritage of Pleistocene southern and western Asians and have received limited gene flow from external regions since the Holocene. The phylogeography [neighboring branches] of the primal mtDNA and Y-chromosome founders suggests that these southern Asian Pleistocene coastal settlers from Africa would have provided the inocula for the subsequent differentiation of the distinctive eastern and western Eurasian gene pools.” (Italics added.)

Noting that mtDNA is carried by the female line, while Y-chromosome is passed on through the male line, what this means is that the Indian population is largely indigenous in origin and has received negligible external input (gene flow) since the end of the last Ice Age (Holocene). This means that various migration theories like the Aryan invasion in 1500 B.C.E. simply cannot be true.

The Oxford geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer is more specific and also more emphatic, focusing on the M17 or the so-called ‘Caucasoid’ (politically correct for ‘Aryan’) genetic marker:

…South Asia is logically the ultimate origin of M17 and his [Sic] ancestors; and sure enough we find highest rates and greatest diversity of the M17 line in Pakistan, India and eastern Iran, and low rates in the Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central Asia, but diversity characterises its presence in isolated tribal groups in the south, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a ‘male Aryan invasion’ of India.

So there was no Aryan invasion— by males or by females. This also means that the tribal or the so-called ‘indigenous’ populations of India are not any different from the people making up the bulk of the Indian population, which is what Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues also found. As Oppenheimer observes, genetics is quite specific on this point.

One age estimate for the origin of this line in India is as much as 51,000 years. All this suggests that M17 could have found his [Sic] way initially from India or Pakistan, through Kashmir, then via Central Asia and Russia, before finally coming to Europe. (Ibid)

It is worth noting that this is the exact reverse of the scenario postulated by various invasion/migration theories including the Aryan invasion theory. This is by no means the last word on population distributions, but new findings are unlikely to salvage these 19th century theories or their modern incarnations founded on linguistics, racial ideas and political needs.

Conclusion: from Galileo to Max PlanckSeen against this background of evidence from a wide range of sources—from natural history and genetics to literary and archaeological records—the idea that the Indian civilization developed in a few centuries, seeded by small groups of invading (or migrating) ‘Aryans’ from the Eurasian steppes cannot be taken seriously. But this is only in hindsight. The fact remains— it was taken seriously, and even today, when one would expect a more enlightened attitude towards facts and evidence than what prevailed in the nineteenth century, various devices are being employed to somehow prevent it from collapse. The recent controversy over the proposed changes in the California school curriculum is only latest episode in this ongoing battle to replace these theories with a new approach based on facts and logic.

This phenomenon of an established order resisting change has a long history. Even in the exact sciences, change rarely takes place without a struggle. The most famous of these is probably Galileo’s struggle with the Church leading to his Inquisition. History books present this as a classic case of religious dogma against science, and point to Galileo as the victim of the struggle of knowledge against dogma and superstition. This is a serious distortion of the true nature of the conflict. What Galileo challenged was not the authority of the Church—he was a devout Catholic—but the worldview of his contemporaries. This worldview held that the empirical method and mathematics—both products of the human mind—could not be applied to the study of the heavens, which they held was the creation of God. According to them it was only theology that could explain the heavens— not experiment and observation, much less mathematics.

This is an important point frequently lost in the oversimplification involved in seeing Galileo’s persecution as a case of science against religion. His adversaries, who prominently included Cardinal Bellarmine, saw themselves as scientists. It was only when they failed to defeat him in the scientific arena that they resorted to influencing religious and political authority represented by the Vatican, then the paramount power in Italy. More than religion, Galileo’s challenge was to theology as the pre-eminent tool in the study of the world. We now see mathematics as the queen of sciences. In Galileo’s time, that position was held by theology. According to Galileo, “the universe is written in the language of mathematics.” This was something that philosophers (i.e., ‘scientists’) like Cardinal Bellarmine would never concede. To them, universe was God’s creation and only theology could be the legitimate tool.

To a historian of science, there is a remarkable similarity between the attitudes of theologians in Galileo’s time and of philologists and anthropologists in our own. They cannot accept the fact that the very foundation of their discipline—not just the Aryan invasion theory—has collapsed. Natural history and genetics have demolished their theories as well as their methods. And like Galileo’s adversaries, they too have chosen to resort to politics and propaganda, though the forces they invoke lack the authority of the Church in Galileo’s time.

Progress, however, does not respect position and prestige. It is unlikely that the proponents of the Aryan theories will be able to turn the clock back or stem progress. What can we expect? Will they recognize that their positions are doomed and learn new facts and master new methods? Highly unlikely. Max Planck, one of the founders of quantum physics that went on to revolutionize physics once observed:

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning.

If history is any guide, it will be no different with the Aryan theories. We are unlikely to convert the existing adherents: they have too must invested in it, and too set in their ways to change. The most we can expect from them is old wine in new bottles— like AIT being served up as the Aryan ‘influx’ theory instead of the Aryan ‘invasion’ theory. Time and progress will take care of them.

So there is little point in engaging beyond an occasional rebuttal of their claims. What we should be focusing on is the next generation of researchers and pave the way for their work. We should be devoting our time and energy less to fighting these ghosts from the past and more to building a foundation for the younger generation. We can begin by highlighting the importance of some crucial factors like ecology and climate change that have been all but ignored by historians and anthropologists for over a century. We can also emphasize the importance of multidisciplinary approaches that combine science and literary records.

In summary, returning to the present situation, let us accept this well established scientific fact: outside of Africa, South Asia contains the world’s oldest populations, and modern Europeans are themselves among the peoples descended from migrants from India, going back more than 40,000 years. There exist ample materials from diverse sources ranging from natural history and archaeology to literature and astronomical records that testify to this.

Let us study them and learn about the people who created them without resort to labels and stereotypes like ‘Aryan’ and ‘Dravidian.’ Our time horizons should also change from centuries to millennia, and even tens of millennia. We need to understand more about the impact of climate change, especially during the transition from the Ice Age to the Holocene. (The Holocene is the present interglacial or warm period in which we are living.) This should be the starting point for studying history in the Holocene or the post Ice Age period.

(Concluded)(The writer is a former U.S. academic and industrial researcher. His latest book is Sarasvati River and the Vedic Civilization: History, science and politics.)http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=268&page=33

INDO-JAPANESE RELATIONS: HYPE & REALITY

by B.Raman

(Based on a talk delivered by the writer at the Indo-Japan Chamber of Commerce & Industry, Chennai, on June 10,2005)

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan visited New Delhi for talks with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and other Indian leaders in the last week of April,2005. In interviews given before the visit, he did not characterise the emerging relationship between India and Japan as a strategic partnership. However, he spoke of a convergence of strategic interests. He said: "Japan and India need each other as strong, prosperous and dynamic partners." He described the objective of his visit as "to reinforce the Japan-India ties with a new strategic orientation in a new Asian era."

2. A joint statement issued at the end of the visit on April 30,2005, spoke of the commitment of the two countries "to a high level strategic dialogue." The dialogue would seek to boost economic, security, energy and other co-operation. It said: " A strong, prosperous and dynamic India is in the interests of Japan and vice versa. ...As partners in the new Asian era and as nations sharing common values and principles, Japan and India will expand their traditional bilateral co-operation to co-operation in Asia and beyond."

3. The use of expressions such as "strategic partnership", " a convergence of strategic interests" , " a strategic orientation to bilateral relations" etc has become a common place in characterising bilateral relations between different countries. The use of the term strategic generally has two connotations. Firstly, it is a long-term relationship with a common vision and shared interests and concerns and not a tactical, short-term or fire-fighting relationship .

4. Secondly, the national security of the two countries forms one of the components of the bilateral relationship. It may be a predominant or very important component as in the case of Pakistan's relations with the US or China or India's relations with the erstwhile USSR or Russia or one of the components without undue importance as in the case of India's relations with the US, Japan, China and many other countries.

5. Addressing an Asian Security conference at New Delhi on January 29,2005, Shri Pranab Mukherjee, the Indian Defence Minister, said: " With China today, we share more common interests and areas of agreement, than differences, including a shared commitment to a multipolar world. Our security ties have undergone a change, with resumption of military ties signified by joint exercises, bilateral visits and sharing of information on military matters of joint interest. By institutionalising the Sino-Indian dialogue at a political level, with regular exchanges between designated interlocutors, the territorial and boundary differences between our two countries are being addressed purposefully."

6. He continued: "Similarly, Indo-Japan relations, which plummeted after India’s 1998 nuclear tests, are now positive and robust. The fillip to Indo-Japanese relations was provided by the August 2000 visit of Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, the first by a Japanese Prime Minister to South Asia in a decade. In his speech he declared, “today Indo-Japanese relations also have a strategic importance, which is quite obvious when we glance at the world atlas”. Despite the geographical distance between the two, there is a growing acceptance that India and Japan share a certain affinity on a number of issues. India and Japan have a convergence on energy issues and have joint concerns about the security of sea-lines of communications and vital choke points in the Indian Ocean. We also share similar concerns about WMD proliferation. Concerns about WMD terrorism are also equally shared. India and Japan also have views about the restructuring of the UN and the Security Council in particular."

7. He thus identified five areas of strategic convergence between India and Japan. These could be divided into the following three components:

POLITICAL: A common objective of securing the permanent membership of the UN Security Council.ECONOMIC: Co-operating instead of competing with each other in meeting each other's energy requirements to keep their economies sustained and growing.SECURITY-RELATED: Shared concerns over maritime and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) terrorism and WMD proliferation. Shri Mukherjee did not name any countries while talking of WMD proliferation, but it was apparent that he was having Pakistan and North Korea in mind.8. The Indo-Japanese common objective of securing the permanent membership of the UN Security Council for which they have been co-operating with each other as well as with the other two aspirants, namely, Germany and Brezil, cannot be really described as a strategic objective with an enduring vision. Once their present exercise for this purpose culminates in success or failure in the coming months, this objective will cease to be a politically binding factor. Unless, in the meanwhile, they find or identify other, more enduring common objectives, the relationship will become bereft of a long-enduring politicazl glue.

9. What could be such a political glue? This question has not received much attention so far from the strategic analysts of the two countries---governmental and non-governmental. The search for it has to be started and intensified. Their common interest in facilitating the search for a negotiated solution to the problem of the Tamils of Sri Lanka without affecting the unity and territorial integrity of Sri Lanka, in assisting the African states in the eradication of poverty and disease, in the research and development of medicines for Aids which would be within the reach of the poor people of Asia and Africa, in the protection of the environment etc etc----there are any number of issues with a visionary impact which could be taken up. How to take them up and pursue them? The time has come to discuss this.

10. Both India and Japan are energy-importing countries. They are dependent on external supplies for keeping their economies sustained and growing. How they could co-operate and help each other in this task? While they have agreed that energy security should be an important component of the bilateral relationship, no concrete action has been taken so far at the governmental and non-governmental levels to translate this agreement into action on the ground. Such action has to be in the form of brainstorming between the experts of the two countries, the drawing-up of a joint or co-ordinated plan of implementation and giving effect to it.

11.Shri Mukherjee did not refer to other equally important aspects of the bilateral economic relations---such as the sluggish growth of the bilateral trade and the unsatisfactory flow of direct investments from Japan into the Indian economy. The determination of the leaders of the two countries to give a strategic thrust to their bilateral relations is not reflected in the actual state of the economic relations.

12. India has been the largest beneficiary of development loans from Japan during the last two years. During the last financial year ending March 31,2005, India is estimated to have received from Japan US $ 1.27 billion to improve infrastructure and eradicate poverty. But, the total value of the bilateral trade stood at a meagre US $ 4.35 billion as against the annual Sino-Indian trade of US $ 13 billion. Between 1991, when India started opening up its economy, and 2004, the value of the total flow of Japanese investments into India was estimated at US $ three billion only.

13. The spectacular increase in the value of the Sino-Indian bilateral trade in recent years has been largely due to the large-scale buying of raw matetials by the Chinese industries from India to meet the galloping needs of the Chinese economy. There was a time after India became independent in 1947 when a war-shattered Japan, which had embarked on a programme of restoring its industries, turned to India to meet its requirements of raw materials---particularly iron ore to feed its re-built iron and steel industry. The Japanese economy is no longer as dependent on the import of raw materials from India as it used to be in the 1950s and the 1960s or as the Chinese economy is now.

14. Indian iron ore is still an important item of export to Japan, but not to the same extent as in the past. The Indian export basket to Japan is still small---iron ore, sea food, textiles and jewellery being the main items. A drive for the expansion and the diversification of the bilateral trade was undertaken after the visit of former Prime Minister Mori in August 2000. Information Technology (IT) products and services were identified as an item, which could have a trigger effect.

15. A Japan-India IT Promotion and Cooperation Initiative was launched and a Japan-India IT summit was held in Japan. Japan liberalised rules for the issue of multiple-entry visas for IT experts from India. It has been estimated that about 50 Indian IT companies have already set up offices in Japan. Despite all these measures, the total value of the export of Indian software products and services to Japan was estimated in the financial year 2002-2003 at an insignificant three per cent of the total value of India's global exports of software products and services. While the figures for the subsequent period are not yet available, the increase has not been substantial.

16. A hurdle in the way of stepping up the exports of IT software products and services to Japan has been the fact that the Indian IT industry is geared up to meet largely the needs of the English-knowing and English-using clientele and not the non-English-knowing and non-English-using customers. Unless the Indian IT industry develops its language capability in a significant measure, its export market will remain largely confined to the English-using world. China, which has been paying more attention to the needs of the non-English using world, is likely to steal a march over the Indian IT software industry. The Chinese have been showing a remarkable thirst for learning the Japanese language. It has been estimated that the Chinese constitute nearly two-thirds of the foreign students studying in Japan.

17. India has some showcase examples of Indo-Japanese economic collaboration. One could cite in this connection the Maruti car project, the Haldia petrochemical complex and the Delhi Metro presently under construction. But those are exceptions that do not disprove the reality of inadequate Japanese interest in investments in India as compared with their enthusiasm for China despite their tension-ridden political relations with China.

18. Among the reasons cited for the poor flow of Japanese investments into India are the unpredictability and sluggishness of the Indian decision-making and implementation process; the tendency to unduly politicise the economic decision-making process which often results in each Government reviewing and sometimes reversing the economic decisions of its predecessor; the poor state of infrastructure as compared to China; the inadequate and erratic power supply; the high cost of power supply as compared to China; and the restrictions (now being removed) on foreign investments in the retail and real estate sectors. It is said that a substantial part of the foreign investment flows into China has been in the retail and real estate sectors and that by keeping these sectors closed until recently, India has denied itself the benefit of a similar flow.

19. It is also pointed out that in the initial years much of the Japanese investments in the manufacturing sector in China was meant to produce cheap consumer goods for the Japanese market by taking advantage of the low wages and other favourable labour conditions in China. A high-value yen had pushed up the cost of production in Japan, thereby driving the Japanese companies to invest in China in order to lower the cost of production of the articles required by the Japanese consumers. It is said that opportunities for such reverse imports do not exist in India.

20. Security-related issues are only now emerging as a component of Indo-Japanese relations. The present focus has been on the need for co-operation against maritime piracy, which is a reality, and maritime terrorism, which is a possibility. The threat perceptions of the two countries relating to maritime terrorism are unlikely to be identical. The possibility of threats in the choke-points of the Gulf area would be of equal concern to the economies of India, Japan and China, but threats in the choke-points of South-East Asia would be of greater concern to Japan and China than to India.

21. Despite this, the Indian Navy seems to be keen to play an active role in South-East Asia. Opportunities for such a role in the Gulf are limited because of the heavy US presence there and the likely concerns of the countries of the Gulf area over the reactions of Pakistan to an enhanced role for the Indian Navy.The littoral States of the Malacca Strait such as Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia would be more comfortable with an Indian role in ensuring maritime security against pirates and terrorists than an American or a Japanese or a Chinese role.The US and Japanese navies would prefer a participatory role for themselves, but if there is resistance to this, they would be comfortable with an Indian role. The Chinese are opposed to an American or a Japanese role, but their attitude to a possible Indian role is unclear. Anyhow, it would not be advisable for the Indian Navy to get involved in the actual patrolling of the Malacca Strait even in the unlikely event of being invited by the littoral states to do so.It should confine its co-operation to exchange of intelligence, provision of training facilitiesand joint anti-piracy and anti-terrorism exercises with the navies of South-East Asia.

22. After the visit of Koizumi to New Delhi, there has been a talk of similar anti-piracy and anti-terrorism c-operation between the Coast Guards of India and Japan.China is and would continue to be an inhibiting factor in the development of the full potential of the bilateral relations between India and Japan in the security-related fields. It is interesting to note that in his speech of January 29,2005, Shri Mukherjee highlighted the developing military-to-military relationship between India and China, but refrained from commenting on the possibility and desirability of similar relationship with the Japanese Armed Forces. Any attempt to give a higher importance to security-related Indian co-operation with Japan is likely to be inhibited by concerns over its likely negative impact on the developing Sino-Indian relations, which are more multi-dimensional than the Indo-Japanese relations.

23. No other country in Asia has benefited more from the Japanese economic interest than China, but there is hardly any political bonding between the two countries. The perceived identity of perceptions between Japan and the US in matters such as the security of Taiwan adds to the traditional Chinese distrust of Japan. The Chinese attitude to Japan has been very short-sighted. The European victims of the Nazi war crimes have not allowed lingering memories of such war crimes to affect their relations with Germany. In fact, after the end of the Second World War, they assisted the new post-Nazi German leadership and people to rid themselves of the guilt complexes arising from the war crimes of their predecessors. They had the mental generosity to realise that they cannot hold the new generation of German leaders and people responsible for the war crimes of their predecessors.

24. Signs of such a mental generosity are not yet evident in China. They continue to hold the present Japanese leadership and people responsible for the war crimes of their predecessors. They are not prepared to assist the Japanese leaders and people to rid themselves of the guilt complexes arising from the war crimes of their predecessors. On the contrary, the Chinese leadership keeps stoking them.

25. So long as this Chinese attitude lasts, the scope for the full development of China's relations with Japan would remain limited and this could have a drag effect on the development of Indo-Japanese relations too. We have to live with this reality.

Since the much-hyped global ‘war on terror', the human rights situation in Southeast Asia has taken a turn for the worse. In the name of fighting Islamic terrorist groups in the region, says political scientist Zachary Abuza, governments are using state power to repress political opposition by targeting political dissidents and making widespread arrests without trial. Malaysia and Singapore continue to use their respective Internal Security Acts, which for decades have been used against bona fide political opponents, not just against militants. Indonesia – which has experienced several devastating terrorist attacks and where the Al-Qaeda affiliate, Jemaah Islamiya, operates actively – enacted a counter-terrorism law after the Bali nightclub bombings of 2002. It also recently expelled Sidney Jones, a respected analyst with the International Crisis Group, which has caused activists to fear a worsening of the human rights situation. Thailand, too, has recently passed counter-terror legislation, Abuza notes, further eroding democratic gains and press freedoms. The Thai military’s April crackdown that left more than 100 people dead in Southern Thailand, he argues, is just another sign that “the region has a way to go to effectively fight terrorism without trampling underfoot human rights.“ – YaleGlobal

The War on Terror Yet to Be Won in Southeast Asia

The region has to walk a fine line between maintaining security and respecting human rights

BOSTON: When the war on terror began in Southeast Asia, there was considerable – and justifiable – concern about the effect that this would have on human rights. Intelligence and security services in the region are politicized and have traditionally focused their resources on domestic opposition. Human rights activists saw the war on terror as being the cover these states needed to round up a large number of dissidents and political opponents, all in the name of fighting Islam. Those fears have not come true, but two recent events – Indonesia's expulsion of Sidney Jones, a respected analyst with the International Crisis Group, and the Thai military’s April crackdown that left more than 100 people dead in Southern Thailand – are evidence that the region has a way to go to effectively fight terrorism without trampling underfoot human rights.

To their credit, states in the region have shown uncharacteristic restraint. Since October 2001, there have only been 250 arrests across the region; far less than in Europe. But the threat of terrorism in the region is real. While it is hyperbole to call Southeast Asia the “Second Front” in the war on terror, Al Qaeda’s regional affiliate, Jemaah Islamiya, has executed several devastating terrorist attacks in Indonesia, and has attempted attacks in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. The two attacks in Indonesia took approximately 1 percent of GDP from the country’s economy. And although much of its leadership has been arrested, JI is still able to attack soft targets, and it continues to recruit new members.

But governments need to be cognizant that one of the key causes of terrorism is coercive policies and the lack of democratization. Using the war on terror to arrest and imprison bona fide political opponents and repressing Muslim communities only serves to drive radicals deeper underground. As a Malaysian JI member quipped, “We stopped believing in the democratic process. So we felt that jihad was the only way to change the government.”

Despite some moderation, there are a number of laws and reforms that the governments in the region could reform.

First, Malaysia and Singapore continue to use their respective Internal Security Acts. While both states have review boards to oversee the ISA detainees, they rarely go against the state. For decades the ISA was used against not just militants, but against bonafide political opponents who threatened the regimes’ monopoly of power. Indefinite detention without trial is politically foolish and morally wrong. One can only assume that the states fear that trials would give the militants a public forum. Yet this logic is counter-productive. Politically, the ISA plays into the hands of the opposition, who sees the ISA as a tool for political repression. They will continue to protest these politically motivated “illegal detentions,” and they will have the moral authority to do so. By giving terrorist suspects a free and fair trial, the governments could win the support of the majority of the population while neutralizing the allegations of their political rivals.

This is not to say that states should not have certain investigative tools. There is a limited period of time in which detainees can provide operational intelligence, but the usefulness of their knowledge diminishes over time. Terrorist cells are highly compartmentalized, and they try to take appropriate counter measures when their members are arrested. There is no reason why states cannot go back and interrogate these suspects once they have been sentenced. Thus, there needs to be a balance in which states have a fixed period to detain people and build up a case against them, if they do not, then these people must be released.

Because fighting terrorism is based on intelligence and police work, it is truly a war “in the shadows.” Yet the lack of government transparency is counterproductive if people feel that their governments are acting with impunity and without any judicial or media oversight. The Singapore Government deserves credit for publishing its White Paper on the Jemaah Islamiyah cell, but it has been the exception, rather than the rule. Malaysia, in particular, has been a veritable black hole of information. Indonesia’s expulsion of Sidney Jones threatens all NGOs and research institutes.

Third, there has been a rapid push by states to enact counter-terrorism legislation. The Indonesian parliament, which had eliminated Soeharto-era security legislation, was in the process of enacting a counter-terrorism law when the Balinese nightclubs were bombed. Shortly thereafter, the legislation passed – over the opposition of many human rights activists.

Indonesian security officials continue to complain publicly that they do not have an internal security act, which would allow them to detain terrorism suspects without trial for a fixed period of time. Yet, because Indonesian police had no such tool, it forced them to build up a significant body of evidence against suspects that would stand up in a court of law. In the process, investigators were able to uncover more cells and get a far better understanding of the scope and modus operandi of the network.

Fourth, there needs to be substantial improvements in multilateral legal tools and frameworks for combating terrorism. ASEAN needs to establish formalized procedures for giving each other access to detained suspects, the right to interrogate them in a way that will stand in a court of law.http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=4089

Leaders greet Vajpayee on his 84th birthdayNew Delhi (PTI): Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee turned 85 on Wednesday, but there were no birthday celebrations in view of last month's Mumbai terror attacks.

President Pratibha Patil was among the first to send greetings with flowers to the BJP veteran, Rastrapathi Bhawan sources said.

Vice President Hamid Ansari sent flowers to the former PM's residence, BJP sources said.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh drove to the octogenarian leader's Krishna Menon Marg residence here to wish him on his 85th birthday. Singh was with Vajpayee for about 15 minutes.

Leader of Opposition and Vajpayee's longtime colleague L K Advani also went to the former Prime Minister's residence to express his birthday wishes, BJP sources said.

The residents of Prini village, known as the former PM's second home, celebrated his birthday on Wednesday in a low key manner.

Locals offered puja at the famous Nag Devta temple at Prini, near Manali, praying for long life of the veteran BJP leader, village head Kundan Kumar told PTI.

Vajpayee used to visit Prini every summer till 2006, before his health deteriorated.

Bureaucrats too involved in loot and extortion in UP: CongNew Delhi (PTI): Accusing the BSP-led government in Uttar Pradesh of indulging in loot and extortion, Congress on Thursday said even the bureaucrats have joined hands with the ruling party leaders.

"Independent India has not seen such an open loot and extortion," AICC General Secretary Digvijay Singh, who is also incharge of party affairs in the state, told reporters here.

Asked whether the bureaucracy too was involved in the loot and extortion in the name of celebrating Mayawati's birthday, Singh said, "Definitely. The bureaucrats too are involved."

Referring to the death of PWD Executive Engineer M K Gupta, allegedly by a BSP legislator and his supporters on Wednesday at Auraiya, the Congress leader said that officials, employees and businessmen have been subjected to extortion in the state.

"Issuing threats to beat somebody and then beating them up has become common in the state...There are several incidents of violence other than that of Auraiya in the state," Singh said.

"I want to ask, what is the reason that no official remains on his post for more than 6 months and without money changing hands, no transfers and postings are done," he said.

Asked whether Congress supports the demand for a CBI enquiry into the incident, Singh said, "The question here is of punishment and not investigation...A fast track court should try the case and punish the culprits who carried out the crime".

ISLAMABAD, Dec 24: Rivals put political differences aside for a while in the National Assembly on Wednesday and unanimously passed a resolution declaring that the Pakistani nation was united and “stands ready to defend its honour and dignity” in the face of perceived Indian challenges over last month’s terror attacks in Mumbai.

The resolution, which came after several days of a staggered debate over national security before the house was prorogued after a 10-day session, supported the government’s efforts to defuse tension with India over New Delhi’s allegations of Pakistani links with the Nov 26 attacks and said the nation and its armed forces “shall together defend Pakistan’s security at all costs”.

While condemning what it called India’s “war hype” and “unsubstantiated allegations levelled in haste against Pakistan”, the document urged the international community to ensure that “India also dismantles its terror networks”.

The text of the resolution, which also condemned the devastating attacks and reaffirmed Pakistan’s desire to pursue “constructive engagement with India,” seemed milder than a lot of rhetoric that dominated the debate, which was wound up by Parliamentary Affairs Minister Babar Awan, who visualised horrific consequences of another war between the two now nuclear-armed rivals and said in a display of Urdu oratory: “Rose petals cannot rain in a war between two nuclear countries.”

Rejecting allegations of weaknesses on the part of the government in dealing with the situation arising from the Mumbai carnage as well as fears about the country being declared a failed or rogue state, he said: “We will not step back from where we stand today.”

“People (in the country) can have complaints about one another but the Pakistani nation has no complaint on the question of Pakistan,” he said, adding that “those seeking to divide the country or frighten us with (threats of) surgical strikes or airspace violations should remove their misunderstanding”.

Stressing that Pakistan did not mean to threaten India, he said: “We are not asleep. We don’t want to threaten anyone. But we neighbours should not demolish the wall of peace (between us because) if streams of blood will flow on this side, they will flow on the other side as well, and if streams of honey will flow on this side they will flow on that side also.”

Foreign Affairs Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi was absent from the debate on its last day without any explanation after reports of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh toning down the rhetoric from his side on Tuesday only a day after his Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherji came close to creating a scare by declaring that India might act on its own if the world failed to make Pakistan to arrest alleged terrorists named by his government.

The resolution was moved by Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Malik Abad Khan who read out the 14-para text without making a speech.

After what it called considering “the developments ensuing from the recent Mumbai attacks, including implications for national security, being desirous of defusing tensions in South Asia, and reaffirming “Pakistan’s strong commitment to peace, security and stability of South Asia and eliminating terrorism in all its forms and manifestations in the region as a whole, the National Assembly said in the resolution that it:

“Condemns on behalf of the people of Pakistan the terrorist attacks in Mumbai and extends sympathy to the families of the victims and the people of India.

“Further condemns the war hype in a situation where war is not an option given the nuclear capabilities of both countries. “Supports the efforts of the government of Pakistan to defuse tension and particularly its offer to cooperate with India and jointly investigate the incident.

“Calls upon India to respond to the constructive proposals made by the government of Pakistan, namely joint investigations and high-level engagement with a view to addressing concerns relating to the Mumbai incident and to defuse tensions in South Asia. “Calls upon the international community to ensure that India also dismantles its terror networks affecting peace in the region and stop regional destabilisation moves. “Urges India to exercise restraint from such activities which undermine Pakistan’s sovereignty and to stop the hostile propaganda which seeks to cover their intelligence failure and promotes such activities which do not serve the cause of peace in the region.

“Resolves that Pakistani nation is united and stands ready to defend its honour and dignity as well as Pakistan’s sovereignty, political independence and territorial integrity.

“Reaffirms its resolve that the nation and the armed forces of Pakistan shall together defend Pakistan’s security interests at all costs.

“Reiterates the importance of respect for the principles of non-intervention and non-interference in the internal affairs of states, which is an essential prerequisite for ensuring peace, stability and progress of South Asia.

“Reaffirms Pakistan’s desire to pursue its constructive engagement with India in a comprehensive manner to build confidence and mutual trust; amicably resolve all outstanding disputes, particularly Kashmir; and establish friendly and good-neighbourly relations with India on the basis of equality and mutual trust.”http://www.dawn.com/2008/12/25/top1.htm

Southeast Asian anger : Behind the Hambali hype, tension risesBy Philip BowringPublished: TUESDAY, AUGUST 19, 2003HONG KONG: Governments in Southeast Asia have reason to be pleased by recent successes in arresting Islamic militants, notably Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, the supposed operations leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, an Islamic extremist group. But Hambali's importance may have been overplayed, and there is evident resentment across Southeast Asia at the United States assuming the role of "regional cop" and disregarding legal extradition procedures.

Talk of terrorism having been "decapitated" and the Australian prime minister's description of Hambali as the "mastermind" and "main link to Al Qaeda" appeal to those who like to believe there is some highly organized, Leninist-style structure at work in the region ã a view that has been successfully peddled to the Western media by friendly intelligence sources ever since the Bali bombing. At the top, so the story goes, quietly sat the organization's ideologist, the Indonesian cleric Abu Bakr Bashir, while Hambali, chief operations officer and Al Qaeda's top man in Southeast Asia, contrived plots to be carried out by loyal foot soldiers, often trained at camps in the southern Philippines.

The reality is murkier, more amorphous. Far from being an organizational genius, Hambali had a mediocre terrorist track record in Malaysia. As the Bali bombing indicated, and the evidence of a convicted bomber, Amrozi, the groups linked to Jemaah Islamiyah are small, decentralized and not necessarily following a common cause. Amrozi seems to have been motivated as much by deep hostility to white foreigners as by commitment to the pan-Islamic state of Jemaah Islamiyah dreams. Earlier bombings in Indonesia were aimed at Indonesian Christians. Jemaah Islamiyah itself still seems more an umbrella for like-minded groups than an actual organization.

Elsewhere in the region, militancy predates Al Qaeda and the Afghanistan war. In the case of the Philippines, the main Muslim group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, remains focused on its local struggle for independence. The Philippine government's effort to get more U.S. aid by portraying the front as part of some vast conspiracy linked to Al Qaeda has been damaged by the claims of mutinous military officers that some "terrorist" bombs had been planted by the military itself. Any links between the front and Al Qaeda or Indonesian militants appear to have been mostly casual.

Any arrest of genuine terror plotters reduces the likelihood of further attacks. But the decentralized nature of the cells and the variety of motives and objectives behind them suggests that the arrest of Hambali, while important symbolically, will of itself do little to reduce regional threats.

Today in OpinionForging new relations with RussiaA move toward more privacy onlineThe world according to Dick CheneyAlthough various national agencies claimed a cooperative role in Hambali's capture, the fact that he has been spirited away to U.S. custody in a secret location has not been well received. Thai sources first announced that he had been extradited to Indonesia. In fact he should have gone either to Malaysia, which has been looking for him for longer than any other state, or to Indonesia, his home country, which has also been seeking him.

The U.S. claim on Hambali seems tenuous by comparison, and U.S. actions have been seen as an example of bullying and support of arbitrary and extralegal means. Hambali's removal from Thailand without due process was made easier by executive decrees issued Aug. 5 that give the Thai government sweeping new powers to bypass Parliament and the courts in the name of fighting terrorism. Civil rights groups, lawyers and opposition parliamentarians have attacked the decrees themselves as threats to civil liberties and the subservience shown to the United States over Hambali has been condemned as a violation of Thai sovereignty. If, as the Thai government says, he was planning an attack within Thailand, why was he not charged there?

While Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand may all have reasons for giving in to the United States, Hambali should be prosecuted fairly and openly in Southeast Asia, where his crimes were allegedly committed. As with Amrozi, a transparent trial in his own country would itself undermine the advocates of bombs. Locking him up and quite possibly torturing him in Guant·namo is more likely to add recruits to the tiny number of Southeast Asian Muslims whose militancy extends beyond local separatist issues such as Aceh and Mindanao.http://www.iht.com/articles/2003/08/19/edbow_ed3__0.phpSouth Asia Analysis Group Notes and Updates

The Sri Lankan government has created a new post of Chairman of the Joint Operations Bureau. A retired Army Commander, General Rohan Daluwatte has taken charge on 6th Jan. 1999. The JOB as the Joint Operations Command is called, was created a few days earlier. It envisages a coordinating role for itself in the operations of three service commands, the Army, the Navy and the Air force. An additional feature of the new scheme is the inclusion of the Police command.

This new set up is not likely to have any immediate impact on the ethnic conflict that has been going on for the last eighteen years, though it is likely to affect the leading role of army in the conflict. The army which has been coordinating the operations so far will have one more tier to deal with. Much would depend on the working relationship between Gen. Weerasooriya, the Sri Lankan army commander who is also new to the post and the chairman of the JOB.

Gen Weerasooriya recently told the "Hindu" that the war will be won by a "process of attrition". What is left unsaid is that attrition could take place in both the camps, the Security forces and the LTTE. He is also reported to have said that the army has no problem in acquiring unrestrained supplies for the conduct of operations!

It is known that operation Jaye sikuru did not bring about any change in the ground situation The LTTE has gained a wider access to their strong hold in Mullaithivu and what is worse, the objective with which the security forces started the operation of opening the road to Jaffna has not been realised despite the hype and expectations created by the army when the operations were begun. It is in this context that the remarks of Gen.Weerasooriya on the war of "attrition" are to be examined.

We have said it before and we say it again- there could be no military solution and both sides are in no position to have a military victory in the near future. Meanwhile the poor people are left to suffer. If the Sri Lankan army could claim that they have achieved sophistication in the operations with a mix of counter-insurgency operations and conventional warfare, the LTTE could equally claim that over the years the conflict on their side has become one from pure guerilla warfare to a mix of guerilla and conventional warfare. They would be justified in claiming so, when they hold on to territory which is "no go" for the security forces.

This is not to belittle the trying conditions under which the security forces operate. Counter insurgency operations are always nasty and to conduct it in an area where the people have no sympathy for the government is not easy. Then there is lack of hard intelligence on LTTE's movements and intentions. The massive attacks on established large army bases, like that of the brigade headquarters at Killinochi is one indicator.

But what is regrettable is, that statements like finding a "military solution", "war of attrition till the end" etc will make it harder for the majority community to understand the ground realities. President Chandrika is yet to forge a consensus with the opposition over the political package first proposed by her, but subsequently whittled down, due to pressure from various vested interests. One high point in her foreign policy was her recent visit to India and forging closer ties- a kind of insurance against any support to LTTE..

The war is not going in any body's favour. Desertions from the Sri Lankan army have reached alarming proportions and repeated calls of amnesty for deserters have not brought forth any response. There are persistent incidents in the east, mainly in Batticola and Amparai tying the Security forces from moving north. LTTE's moves to create diversions in the east may be a precursor for another major attack in the north.

The LTTE also has suffered some losses in the sea although they claim that they have destroyed one Devora class gun boat of Sri Lankan Navy in one of the recent clashes. Though supplies of fuel and medicine continue to come from India, there is a possibility of further tightening of security by the Indian Coast Guard and the Navy. The new recruits to the LTTE, boys and girls also appear to be younger. The supply is therefore is not inexhaustible.

We believe that a negotiated settlement is possible. A suggestion has been made that perhaps South Africa where the LTTE has moved its headquarters, is in a position to mediate. But the two sides should make up their mind as to what they want. A military solution? We do not think it is possible in the near term.

South Asians will watch the year end in a pall of gloom. The region is fast getting sucked into the vortex of terrorism. The Afghan war has crossed the Khyber and is stealthily advancing towards the fertile Indo-Gangetic plains.

Whatever hopes might have lingered that Barack Obama would be a harbinger of "change", have also been dashed by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The Financial Times of London reported on Monday that in an exclusive interview Rice prophesied that the incoming Obama administration might have little option but to follow the current US approach on a range of foreign policy issues. Significantly, her prognosis figured in the course of a foreign policy review that primarily focused on Russia, Iran and Afghanistan.

South Asian security is at a crossroads. On the one hand, the United States made great strides in getting embedded in the region on a long-term footing. South Asia must figure as a rare exception in the George W Bush era's dismal foreign policy legacy. On other hand, the big pawn on the South Asian chessboard, India, is heading for parliamentary elections. Almost certainly, a new government with new thinking will assume office in Delhi by May. US-India ties will also come under scrutiny.

Hype of US-India tiesThe Bush administration made the Indian leadership feel "special". The Indian establishment felt comfortable with the US's regional policy, which it fancied as working in favor of its aspirations to emerge as the pre-eminent power in the Indian Ocean region. Delhi had no problems with the creeping "militarization" of the Bush administration's regional policy; more precisely, the Pentagon's "muscling" or ''encroachment" into a striking number of aspects of the US government, including its foreign policy, as Thomas A Schweich, former senior State Department official with hands-on experience on Afghanistan, put it in a devastating article last Sunday in the Washington Post

What mattered to Delhi was that the US regional policy regarded India as a counterweight to China. Equally, Delhi was not perturbed that the cold warriors in Washington were relentlessly pursuing a policy of encirclement of its traditional ally Russia or pressing for a regime change in Iran, India's close friend. In fact, Delhi cut adrift from the regional politics and single-mindedly focused on its strategic partnership with the US, which, it felt, if carefully nurtured, would take care of India's two main challenges on the foreign policy front, namely, its adversarial relationships with China and Pakistan, and elevate India altogether from the morass of its regional milieu.

The US-India nuclear agreement signed in September, the burgeoning military-to-military cooperation, the prospect of "inter-operability" between the two armed forces - all this elevated US-India ties to the level of a veritable alliance.

Delhi took in its stride the status of a key "non-NATO ally" that the US regional policy ascribed to India's arch-rival Pakistan - comfortable in the estimation that the Pakistani connection after all was a passing need of the US in the context of the Afghan war, whereas India was the US's "natural ally".

Meanwhile, Delhi systematically began harmonizing its own regional policies with the US's strategy, especially with regard to rolling back its cooperation with Iran while boosting security ties with Israel, distancing itself from the trilateral format involving Russia, China and India, and reducing to a minimum its involvement with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

India signed up with a "quadrilateral alliance" involving the US, Japan, Australia and India in a bizarre containment strategy toward China, which, of course, annoyed Beijing. Some in the Indian strategic community openly threatened to play a "Tibet card" against China, confident in the strength of the US-India strategic partnership. Hubris crept into the Indian mindset, which was indeed a startling sight, altogether new to the millennia-old largely benign Indian civilizational temper.

The Indian leadership paid heed to US and Israeli opposition to the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project despite its immense significance for India's energy security, besides holding the potential of realizing a long-lost dream of making Pakistan a real "stakeholder" in good-neighborly relations. In a dramatic illustration of how much Delhi's policies shifted, the Indian security czars took the visiting Israeli army chief in September to the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, almost signaling that India was joining hands with the US-Israeli fight against "Islamic terror".It was a calibrated act of strategic defiance, extraordinary for Delhi's traditionally cautious West Asia policy or power projection in the Arab world. Delhi was showing its thumb's up at the Muslim opinion regarding the US-led war against "Islamic terror". It didn't seem to care how much antagonism was building up against the US's war on Islamic terror or against Israel's state terrorism within Pakistan and in the neighboring regions of the Muslim Middle East.

Israel's influence on the Indian foreign and security establishment peaked. Most important, Delhi overlooked all pressing evidence that the US-led war in Afghanistan was closely linked to the containment strategy towards Russia and Iran (and China) and the eastward advance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) into the Asian theater.

In February, when visiting US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates suggested an Indian military deployment in Afghanistan, it was received with careful attention and empathy. Some Indian analysts argued that this was actually a good thing as it would inevitably lead to the US and India joining hands to cleanse Pakistan's body polity of its Islamic fervor and make it a truly civilized, democratic country.

Indian illusions shaken upThen the terrorists struck on the western Indian city of Mumbai, India's financial capital, on November 26. The horrific violence came as a chilling reminder to Delhi that the more things seemed to change in the power equilibrium in South Asia, they have remained much the same as they were through past decades. India quickly sobered up to the realization that its security is ultimately defined by its neighborhood and there is no running away from the hard realities of life.

The past four-week period has also shaken up Indian illusions regarding Washington's regional policies. It is plain to see that the US never really abandoned its "hyphenated" policy towards India and Pakistan as South Asia's two important rival powers, both of which are useful in their own ways for the pursuit of the US's geostrategies.

Within hours of the Mumbai attacks, Rice rushed to Delhi to commiserate. She promised quick action to bring the terror machine to book. She urged Delhi to exercise restraint while she worked on the Pakistani leadership to cooperate with India. She then flew to Pakistan. Two other top US officials followed up Rice's mission in the following weeks. Delhi waited patiently though evidence began to pile by the hour that the terrorists had set out from Pakistani soil in a well-orchestrated operation of high professional skill that would have been possible only with the connivance and support of the security establishment in Islamabad.

Meanwhile, Pakistan, which is vastly experienced in handling Washington's "pressure", began ably working on Rice and the US military and political establishment. By last week, Islamabad seemed to have concluded that the US pressure had all but run its course. Actually, by gently holding out the threat to the US that the Afghan operations would grievously suffer unless Washington restrained Delhi from precipitating any tensions on the India-Pakistan border, Islamabad seems to have neatly pole-vaulted over Rice to appeal straight to the Pentagon, where there is abiding camaraderie towards the Pakistani generals.

The Pakistani generals' calculation proved correct when the Pentagon made it abundantly clear to Delhi that it wouldn't allow the Pakistani generals to be "distracted" at this juncture. Speaking from Camp Eggers in Afghanistan on December 20, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, laid down the ground rules for India. He said the overarching strategy for success in Afghanistan must be regional in focus and include not just Afghanistan, but also Pakistan and India. Continuing in this seemingly innocuous vein, Mullen explained that the three countries must "figure a way" to decrease tensions between them and the "regional strategy" here is aimed at addressing long-term problems that increase instability in the region.

Mullen then referred specifically to Kashmir as a problem where reduction of tensions "allowed the Pakistani leadership ... to focus on the west [border with Afghanistan]". He expressed apprehension that the terror attack in Mumbai might "force the Pak leadership to lose interest in the west", apart from bringing India and Pakistan closer to a nuclear flashpoint. Curiously, Mullen gave credit to the Pakistani top brass for cooperation in the Afghan war, which "has had a positive impact" on the ground.

US hinting at Kashmir mediationMullen probably hoped to rattle Delhi by confirming what many American "experts" have been recently suggesting, namely, the US is working on a "regional strategy" in South Asia, which grouped Afghanistan, Pakistan and India together. He virtually corroborated a recent hint by US Senator John Kerry (who is expected to chair the powerful Senate Committee on Foreign Relations) that Obama would be appointing a special envoy for South Asia in an unprecedented move.

Delhi finds such ideas completely unacceptable. Delhi traditionally rejected any outside "third-party" mediation in India-Pakistan disputes. Having said that, successive governments in Delhi tacitly acquiesced with a US mediatory role in India-Pakistan relations in the recent years since the Kargil conflict in 1999. To be sure, Delhi's pragmatism was based on the belief that it wouldn't be a bad idea if the US used its influence on Pakistan to moderate its policies on the range of issues generating India-Pakistan tensions - Pakistani support for cross-border militancy and terrorism, in particular. In other words, Delhi preferred to selectively avail of the US mediatory role in areas where it stood to gain.

But an institutionalized US mediatory mission in South Asia hyphenating Afghanistan, Pakistan and India is an altogether different proposition. It not only linked India and Pakistan but it also held out the danger of constant US meddling in Indian policies. The intriguing thing is why the US has projected its "regional strategy" doctrine at this juncture, knowing fully well that Delhi will find it disagreeable.

One possible explanation is that the US is attempting pressure tactics by appointing a special envoy to discuss Kashmir. Washington has been strongly pitching for a fair share of the multi-billion dollar arms deals that are in the Indian pipeline. A single deal for the procurement of 126 aircraft and related supplies including co-production alone can be worth anywhere up to US$16 billion. The Bush administration hoped to clinch the deal before year-end.

Gates visited Delhi in February with the arms merchants and unabashedly canvassed for awarding the contracts through direct negotiations rather than international tender. But the Indians are sticking to their cumbersome tender procedures which require the US companies to compete with Russia and France and other arms manufacturers.

Not only that, Delhi recently overlooked the Pentagon's sales pitch and awarded a lucrative contract for helicopters to Russia worth $1.3 billion. A leading pro-American newspaper promptly wrote an editorial condemning the Indian government's decision.

Indeed, Mullen's statement rings a warning bell for Delhi. But then, a difficult choice lies ahead for Obama. Will he rake up the Kashmir issue as a pressure tactic? It is certain that Delhi will reject any US attempt to mediate on Kashmir. An extraordinarily high voter turnout in the current election to the provincial legislature in Srinagar vindicates Delhi's stand that there is no need or scope for any outside intervention in the Kashmir issue.

Defying all doomsday predictions and despite the prevailing impression of widespread political alienation among Kashmiris, the voters in the state have affirmed an extraordinary faith in India's democratic process. The voter turnout touched as high as 60% in the election, which has been held in a atmosphere free of violence and coercion. Therefore, Delhi will see no reason to give in to any third party mediation.

Pakistan seizes initiativeClearly, there are several templates to the terror attacks on Mumbai. No matter who planned and executed the Mumbai attacks from Pakistani soil and with what complicated motives, the recent events have immensely helped the generals in Rawalpindi at this juncture to correct the imbalances they perceived in the US's South Asian policies during the past three to four years, which they regarded to be weighed in India's favor, despite Pakistan being the key US ally in the "war on terror" and its armed forces having taken a heavy beating with hundreds of casualties.

Also, Islamabad has exposed the fallacy in Indian thinking that it occupies the pride of place as the US's "natural ally" globally, while Pakistan was a mere collaborator in an anti-insurgency war on the Afghan tribal tracts. In turn, the events have also helped Islamabad highlight the complexities of the US-Pakistan relationship, which is far from a client relationship. This comes particularly helpful for Islamabad since there is an air of uncertainty about the policies towards Pakistan under the new administration in Washington. At a minimum, Obama would have noted that the Pakistani generals are no easy pushover. The fact of the matter is that the Rice mission to the region in the wake of the Mumbai attacks brought out the limits to the US's capacity or willingness or both to "pressure" Pakistan.

Significantly, amid all the fracas over the Mumbai attacks and despite repeated Indian calls to isolate Pakistan in the world community as the "epicenter" of terrorism, Washington is quietly putting together a new multi-billion dollar aid package for Pakistan, and CENTCOM is drawing up a new five-year plan committing $300 million assistance annually to the Pakistani military.

Kerry, while on a recent visit to Islamabad, made the commitment to speed up the "mid-life upgradation" of Pakistan's F-16 aircraft capable for delivering nuclear weapons. He said the US considered a "vibrant, strong, economically viable" Pakistan to be "vital for peace and stability in South Asia".

Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Islamabad has weathered the US "pressure" over the Mumbai attacks. In Islamabad's estimation, the focus in Washington is turning to the gala inaugural ceremony of Obama on January 20, followed by several weeks during which no major US foreign policy initiatives need to be expected as the new administration settles in. Thus, Islamabad has shrewdly judged that sooner, rather than later, the international community will begin counseling Delhi to engage Pakistan in a spirit of dialogue.

India running out of optionsWith Pakistan's recalcitrance and Mullen's veiled threat of reopening the Kashmir file, a sense of frustration is gripping Delhi. Pakistan has ignored India's tough posturing. The faltering Indian security agencies, which have been in a state of appalling decline in recent years, seem to have failed to put together any hard evidence of a Pakistani involvement in the Mumbai attacks.

The Pakistani generals count on Washington to rein in India. And Delhi is fast running out of options. In the spirit of its "strategic partnership" with the US, if Delhi counted on Washington to read the riot act to Islamabad, it is dismayed to see that Washington is more interested in restraining India rather than do any arm-twisting on Pakistan. Rice increasingly looks like an angel beating her wings in vain, while the Pakistani generals have ensured that the imperatives of the Afghan war leave the Pentagon no option but to be supportive.

At the same time, India is heading for a crucial, tightly fought parliamentary election within a few months and the government cannot afford to appear to be weak and rudderless. The majority opinion in the country somehow has convinced itself that the Pakistani security establishment perpetrated the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. The government faces potentially damaging criticism in the competitive domestic politics that its US-centric foreign policy has run into a cul-de-sac. The powerful pro-US lobby in Delhi's strategic community and the corporate media already looks confused. The fizz in the US-India strategic partnership is fast vanishing. The much-touted US-India nuclear deal, hailed as a historic achievement of the government, already looks jaded and something of an embarrassment.

Obama's war prioritiesThus, the challenge facing Obama is having to reconcile the almost irreconcilable contradictions in the US's South Asia policy. Surely, his number one priority will be to stave off defeat in the war in Afghanistan. Obama's Afghan strategy is to double the level of US forces in Afghanistan from 32,000 troops at present and to try to arrest and incrementally reverse the Taliban's steady gains in the recent period. Clearly, the US intends to engage the Taliban politically and is no longer averse to accommodating the Taliban in the power structure at some point in the next year or two, but this has to be from a position of strength. No doubt, 2009 is a decisive year of the war.

At the same time, Afghanistan is heading for presidential elections in 2009. Hamid Karzai has stated his intention to seek another five-year mandate. In 2004, the US was in a commanding position and could dictate the course of Afghan politics. But that is not quite the situation today. Even Karzai is showing the gumption to openly mock at the US's Afghan strategy. Asked by the Chicago Tribune last week about Obama's description of Karzai as weak and spending too much time in a bunker, the Afghan president snapped back, "Bunker? We are in a trench, and our allies are with us in the trench. We were on a high hill with a glorious success in 2002 ... We must now look back and find out as to why we are in a trench, or if you'd like to describe it, as a bunker."

Four years ago, it was unthinkable that Karzai would have used such biting sarcasm against the US ambassador in Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad, let alone Bush. Karzai asked, "Why are we in a bunker?" He then went on to tear the US war strategy to pieces for its mindless and excessive use of force, and concluded, "And if this behavior continues, we will be in a deeper trench than we are in today. And the war against terrorism will end in a disgraceful defeat."

Clearly, in these troubled times ahead, Obama cannot afford to get tough with the Pakistani generals. He will need all his charm to coax them to cooperate for the successful conduct of the war, and they can be a difficult lot indeed as the recent destruction of the NATO's supply convoys amply testify. Besides, Pakistan holds the trump card in any political reconciliation involving the Taliban. Arguably, Pakistan has a crucial say in the election of the next Afghan president as well. After all, the onerous duty falls on Islamabad to orchestrate the participation of over 4 million Afghan refugees who are living in Pakistan in the election process, and these ethnic Pashtuns could be a decisive vote bank in determining who the next Afghan president will be.

Of course, much will also depend on Obama's adherence to the "Great Central Asia strategy", which aims at rolling back Russia, Iran and China's regional influence. If he is genuinely keen to work out a durable Afghan settlement, he will need to take help and cooperation from Russia, Iran and India in putting together a credible inter-Afghan reconciliation. In fact, such an approach - broad-basing the search for an Afghan settlement - will help reduce Obama's dependence on Pakistan. Delhi will welcome such an approach by the Obama administration. But would the cold warriors in Washington allow Obama to opt for a change of course? Unlikely. Indeed, against the backdrop of the Afghan war, there has been a creeping takeover of the US foreign and security policy in South Asia by the generals in the Pentagon who are probably today quite in a position to devour Obama's call for change.

Reality check for IndiaAll this adds up to a harsh reality for Delhi: it might as well abandon any hopes that Obama will turn the screws on the Pakistani generals. On the contrary, the Pakistani generals may have concluded that it is their turn to expect that the US puts pressure on Delhi to behave with restraint. (Of course, there is no guarantee that such terrorist attacks as on Mumbai do not repeat.) The Pakistani generals may not think it sufficient enough if the US restores an even-handed approach to relations with the two South Asian rivals. Conceivably, they may insist on US mediation in India-Pakistan disputes, especially on the Kashmir issue. They will insist that unless Pakistan is free of its threat perceptions on its eastern border, the armed forces will remain far too "distracted" to concentrate on the war in Afghanistan.

That is why, the denouement of the current crisis over the Mumbai terrorist attacks will be of critical importance for India. Delhi is beginning to feel disenchanted by the US role in the crisis. Using unusually tough language, Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee hinted that India's patience with Pakistan was wearing thin. Speaking in Delhi on Tuesday, Mukherjee made plain his displeasure with the US mediation in the current crisis. He said, "While we continue to persuade the international community and Pakistan, we are also clear that ultimately it is we who have to deal with this problem. We will take all measures necessary as we deem fit to deal with the situation."

Mukherjee added, "We are not saying this just because we are affected but because we believe that it will be good for the entire civilized world and also for the Pakistani people and society. This terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan is the greatest danger to the peace and security of the entire civilized world."

But all indications are that Pakistan is not impressed by the Indian rhetoric. It seems to think Indian politicians are grandstanding in an election year. But, just in case Delhi may spring a surprise, Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Kiani has warned that the armed forces would give an equal response "within few minutes" if India carried out any surgical military strikes. "The armed forces are fully prepared to meet any eventuality, and the men are ready to sacrifice for their country," he reportedly said.

As Delhi and Islamabad dig in, Obama will have a hard time balancing the US's regional policy. However, one positive outcome will be that the US-India relationship will emerge out of this phase as a more mature process, having shed the false expectations and the rhetorical hype of recent years. A new government will also be assuming office in Delhi by next May and it is bound to take a fresh look at the "strategic partnership" with the US.

It is highly unlikely that any new leadership in Delhi will emulate current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's ardor for India's strategic partnership with the US. India will also have drawn its lessons from the current crisis. The return to an independent foreign policy may become necessary - almost unavoidable. The year 2009 may well prove to be a formative year of readjustment in India's post-Cold War foreign policy.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.

Source: by M K Bhadrakumar Posted by: ???? http://www.warandpeace.ru/en/reports/view/30939/Behind the India-Pakistan ceasefireBy Keith Jones29 December 2003Recent weeks have seen a flurry of initiatives aimed at easing tensions between India and Pakistan, nuclear powers that in 2002 came to the brink of all-out war.

On Nov. 26, Indian and Pakistani armed forces ended 14 years of virtually daily artillery exchanges, when they began a “general” ceasefire —a ceasefire that covers the international border between India and Pakistan and the Line of Control (LOC) and Siachen Glacier in the disputed Kashmir region. Subsequently, India and Pakistan agreed to resume air and rail links, broken off by India in December 2001, and to various other “confidence-building” measures, including joint army patrols of the international border.

The ceasefire and other steps have been welcomed by all the great powers, including the European Union, Russia, China and Japan. The Bush administration, which has embraced Pakistan’s military regime as a key ally in its “war on terrorism” and has identified India as a potential strategic partner of the US, is a moving force behind the Indian-Pakistani rapprochement. Yet thus far, Washington has found it politic to downplay its role. US officials will only admit to encouraging the two sides to talk, although it is evident that the Bush administration is using the US’s growing economic and military leverage in Central and South Asia to prod the two sides to the negotiating table.

Much stock is now being placed on the interaction between top Indian and Pakistani leaders that is to occur at the summit of the seven-nation South Asian Association for Regional Conference (SAARC), which will be held in Islamabad for three days beginning January 4.

Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who only confirmed his participation in the SAARC meeting earlier this month, will hold bilateral talks with Pakistani prime minister Zafarullah Jamali and possibly also with General Pervez Musharraf. The head of Pakistan’s armed forces, Musharraf seized power in a 1999 coup and later made himself the country’s president.

Vajpayee, however, has played down the significance of the encounters he will have with Pakistan’s leaders during the SAARC summit. On December 25, he reaffirmed the position India has held since December 2001, when New Delhi ruptured normal relations with Pakistan claiming that it was responsible for a terrorist attack on India’s Parliament: India will not hold substantive negotiations with Pakistan until the latter renounces “cross-border terrorism” and dismantles bases in the Pakistan-held part of Kashmir used by anti-Indian insurgents.

Vajpayee’s statement and India’s caginess about whether he will meet with Musharraf underscore the tenuous character of the warming in Indo-Pakistani relations.

Even in their respective proposals for normalizing relations there has been an element of one-upmanship, with India and Pakistan jockeying for Washington’s favor by portraying itself as the more eager for a relaxation of tensions. Just days after Vajpayee had mused about the possibility of a South Asia with open borders and a common currency, Musharraf gave an interview in which he said Pakistan is willing to be flexible on its decades-old demand for the implementation of UN resolutions on Kashmir that would allow for its accession to Pakistan through a plebiscite.

More significantly, Pakistan has taken strong exception to India’s construction of a fence that follows the LOC, although several miles back from the demarcation line between Indian- and Pakistani-held Kashmir. India began construction of the fence long ago, but prior to the ceasefire, work on it had been next to impossible due to artillery exchanges.

Deep-rooted, elite opposition

There is strong popular support in both India and Pakistan for a de-escalation of tensions—a fact even Vajpayee had to concede when a few months ago he declared that the “peace camp” in India is much larger than that favoring the perpetuation of enmity with Pakistan. Yet, any Indo-Pakistani rapprochement will invariably encounter strong opposition from powerful sections of the countries’ elites, especially if and when the Kashmir question is broached.

Since the 1947 communal partition of the subcontinent, both the Indian and Pakistani bourgeoisies have made the conflict against the rival state central to their ruling ideologies. Pakistan’s elite, above all its politically powerful military-security establishment, has made the “liberation” of Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, a national if not a holy cause. Indian rulers, meanwhile, have blamed the Pakistani “foreign hand” for any number of domestic problems and made it a touchstone of government policy that any questioning of the borders laid down in 1947 would be an intolerable threat to the unity of multinational India.

The current ruling regimes in both India and Pakistan are themselves both strongly identified with extreme chauvinism and militarism, meaning that should they pursue rapprochement they will come into headlong conflict with important parts of their traditional constituencies.

The dominant force in India’s ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition is the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP and its predecessor, the Jana Sangh, have always opposed even the limited autonomy granted the state of Jammu and Kashmir under India’s constitution, frequently attacked their political opponents for being “soft” on Pakistan, and repeatedly accused India’s large Muslim minority of being disloyal and pro-Pakistani. Shortly after coming to power in 1998, the BJP proclaimed India a nuclear power, defying international condemnation to stage nuclear tests, and embarked on a massive and still continuing buildup of India’s armed forces. The BJP-led NDA won re-election in 1999, by portraying the withdrawal of Pakistani forces from the Kargil region of Kashmir after a half-year long incursion as a major military and geo-political victory that India won thanks to its sagacious leadership.

Mimicking the Bush administration’s response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack, the BJP-led government seized on the December 2001 terrorist attack on India’s parliament to mount a 10-month-long mobilization of India’s armed forces along the Pakistani border, demanding that Pakistan in effect admit to being a terrorist-sponsoring state or face invasion.

Musharraf, meanwhile, owes his rule to the military-security forces, the section of the Pakistani elite most associated with anti-Indian chauvinism and the patronage of Islamic fundamentalism. Musharraf was the mastermind of Pakistan’s 1999 Kargil incursion. His belief that Nawaz Sharif caved into US pressure and prematurely ended the Kargil operation was a major factor in his decision to oust the Pakistani prime minister and seize the reins of government. While under intense US pressure, Musharraf was forced to withdraw Pakistani patronage of the Taliban regime and has announced repeated crackdowns on armed Islamic groups in Pakistan. He recently signed a political pact with the parliamentary Islamic opposition, the Muthadia Majlis-I-Amal or United Action Front. During the 2001-02 war crisis, Musharraf was more than ready to brandish the threat of Pakistan resorting to nuclear weapons to repel an Indian attack.

That said, the ceasefire—the first in 14 years—has thus far held, and talks on increased economic ties including a natural gas pipeline linking Iran and India via Pakistan are said to be advancing. Musharraf is clearly courting personal danger in taking steps, such as the ceasefire, that strengthen India in its battle with the Kashmir insurgents, yet thus far he has persisted with the rapprochement.

Washington’s role

A number of factors account for the ceasefire and the prospect of hard-bargaining between India’s and Pakistan’s elites over their inter-state relations, but Washington clearly has played a pivotal role.

During the Cold War, Washington was closely allied with Pakistan. But over the past decade it has increasingly come to identify India as a state with which it wants to partner in the twenty-first century. According to a recent report issued by a task force on South Asia that was co-sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, a highly influential Washington think tank, and staffed with several former US ambassadors to India and Pakistan, “The turnaround in US-India relations has been remarkable when viewed against the background of the previous half century of estrangement. If New Delhi and Washington continue to broaden and deepen official and non-official ties, the prospects are good that by 2010 the world’s two largest democracies will succeed in consolidating a genuine partnership.”

Washington’s new tilt toward India was manifest in the 1999 Kargil dispute, when US president Bill Clinton personally intervened to press Sharif to order a unilateral withdrawal of Pakistani and Pakistani-supported forces. Yet there are definite limits to the US’s willingness to support Indian belligerence against Pakistan. If India ultimately failed to act on its war threats in 2001-02, it was largely because the US and its allies made clear that an invasion of Pakistan that risked triggering a nuclear exchange and that at the very least would jeopardize the US occupation of Afghanistan would be viewed by the US as inimical to its interests.

Pakistan—US dissatisfaction over the vigor of its crackdown on Islamic extremists notwithstanding—remains critical to the US’s campaign against Al-Qaeda, the US occupation of Afghanistan and more generally the expansion of US influence in the oil-rich Central Asian region. Moreover, in respect to the Indo-Pakistani conflict, Washington is sufficiently at a distance to recognize, unlike many in the Hindu chauvinist BJP, that India’s unrelenting military pressure could help cause Pakistan—a country riven by numerous ethnic-religious conflicts and hobbled by foreign debt—to implode, spreading instability across Central, West and South Asia.

According to the previously cited task force on South Asia, “The United States has a major stake in a stable Pakistan at peace with itself and its neighbors...” However, aid to Pakistan, the task force argues, should be pegged to Islamabad’s progress in implementing IMF-dictated privatization plans and public spending cuts and in “barring the use of its territory to sustain insurgencies against its neighbors and fulfilling [nuclear] non-proliferation responsibilities.”

In the past, the US largely ignored the Indo-Pakistani conflict. Indeed, insofar as it helped bind Pakistan to the US, Washington had a Cold War interest in perpetuating it. Now Washington has switched gears. It deems it important to US strategic interests to bring the Pakistani-supported insurgency in Kashmir to an end and to find a long-term solution to the Indo-Pakistani conflict, including their competing claims in Kashmir, and this for several reasons. Washington believes that Kashmir has become a cause and recruiting ground for anti-American Islamic extremists. Secondly and more fundamentally, the Indo-Pakistani conflict cuts across the US’s ambitions for the region.

US big business has identified India as a crucial area for future expansion. Now that India has abandoned virtually all its restrictions on foreign capital, US transnationals are eager to gain access to its consumer market and natural resources, and above all to tap into its vast supply of cheap labor, both unskilled and university-trained. Over the past decade, the US has emerged as far and away India’s largest trading partner, and much of that trade is in so-called information services, which includes everything from call-centers to the writing of computer software.

No less significantly, US strategists have identified India as a crucial economic and military counterweight to China. Not only is India commensurate in size to China, it shares a border with it—including in the strategically situated Kashmir region—and China and India have a decades-long border dispute, which in 1962 erupted in war. Already, the US has established significant military ties with India, including the regular staging of joint naval and army exercises.

Pakistan’s narrowing options

Threatened by a bellicose India, its two decades-long Afghanistan policy in ruins, and with about half of its state budget devoted to military spending and debt-servicing, Pakistan is extremely vulnerable to US pressure. But US pressure alone does not account for Musharraf’s newfound conciliatory attitude toward India. There are signs that the Islamic fundamentalist leadership Islamabad helped foist on the Kashmir insurgency has caused it to lose a fair measure of popular support. Islamic fundamentalist terrorism has also exacerbated religious and national-ethnic strife within Pakistan. Thus, increasing sections of the Pakistani elite are questioning the viability and wisdom of open-ended support to the Kashmir insurgency.

Last but not least, the gap between the sizes of India’s and Pakistan’s economies continues to grow, making the task of trying to match India’s military build-up ever-more burdensome.

Musharraf would appear to have concluded that given Pakistan’s weakness, the wisest course is to accommodate Washington in its desire for a defusing of tensions with India. By so doing, not only does he ensure the Bush administration’s continued support, but he can explore the prospects of cutting a bargain with New Delhi before the power gap between the two states widens and under conditions where the US still deems Pakistan vital to the “war on terrorism.”

Traditionally, Pakistan has held that all of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, as a territory with a Muslim-majority population, rightfully belongs to Pakistan. But by saying Pakistan would be willing to accept something less than stipulated in the UN resolutions, he is raising the possibility of alternate solutions, including one said to be favored by Islamabad that would see Kashmir partitioned on communal lines, with the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley ceded to Pakistan, while most of the Jammu region is consigned to India. There is no reason, however, to believe the Indian elite will accept such a “compromise.” It continues to lay claim to the Pakistani-province of Azad Kashmir, although it has signalled in the past that it might be willing to settle for the current LOC being made into an international border.

India’s quest for recognition as South Asia’s dominant power

The Indian government’s December 2001 war mobilization—Operation Parakam—is now widely viewed in Indian political and state security circles as a failure. A vocal minority of military leaders and strategists attack the NDA government for losing its nerve and not making good on its war threats. But most see the 10-month, million-man war mobilization to have been a colossal waste of money and resources, which ultimately only served to underline that the relationship of forces between Indian and Pakistan is such that India cannot bully and threaten Islamabad the way the Bush administration has done with states it has declared to be sponsoring terrorism.

In the wake of Operation Parakam, the NDA government has taken steps to acquire a host of new weapons systems, thus indicating its aim is to seek military-strategic superiority, with at least the hope that an arms race will further weaken Pakistan.

But given the failure of its preferred strategy of military confrontation, at least in the short-term, the NDA government has been forced to explore other options, including possible negotiations with Kashmiri separatists. Whilst historically New Delhi has been dead set against any outside intervention in the Kashmir conflict, the Times of India and other establishment voices have suggested, given Washington’s eagerness for a strategic partnership with India, that it would be wise to accept US offers of assistance in bringing Pakistan to the bargaining table and even de facto US mediation.

Not least among those pressing for such a change of course is Indian big business. While the Indian bourgeoisie’s newfound confidence in its prospects are no doubt overblown—India’s share of world trade remains less than 1 percent, and its growth rates continue to trail far behind those of China—its emergence as a global player and the experience of a free trade agreement with Sri Lanka have led Indian capital to conclude that through increased trade ties it will be able to anchor its dominant role across South Asia. Indian economic dominance would complement New Delhi’s quest for winning for India the status of regional super-power through the development of its military might.

Last September—long before the current ceasefire—the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) established an “India-Pakistan CEO’s Forum” to promote freer trader between the two countries, and the CII is working to breathe life into the objective of creating a South Asian trade zone by 2006. At the same time, India has sought to place further pressure on Islamabad, by threatening to pursue bilateral trade deals with the other SAARC members, should Pakistan balk at reviving SAARC’s proposals for a subcontinental trade bloc.

Thus, behind the talk of reconciliation and peace, all three major players in the Indo-Pakistan rapprochement—Washington, Islamabad and New Delhi—are pursuing their predatory national interests.

The 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent was one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century—a tragedy that resulted in the deaths of 2 million people, rendered 14 million homeless and has led to a decades-long rivalry that has caused three wars and now threatens South Asia with nuclear conflagration. British imperialism, with its strategy of divide and rule, bears great responsibility for inciting communal animosity in South Asia. But the partition was proposed and implemented by the Indian National Congress and Muslim League leaders—the political representatives of the South Asian bourgeoisie—who combined to abort the anti-imperialist struggle. Six decades later, a genuine and progressive solution to the problems posed by the sharing of the resources of the subcontinent by its myriad national-ethnic and religious groups will only be forged through a common struggle against imperialism and the rival national bourgeoisies, a struggle led by the working class and with the aim of establishing a Socialist United States of South Asia.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/dec2003/ipak-d29.shtml

US plays matchmaker to Pakistan, IsraelBy M K Bhadrakumar

Geopolitics around Pakistan are taking dramatic turns. Details are emerging of a meeting between Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

A spin has been given that Musharraf and Barak had a "chance encounter" in a hotel lobby in Paris. It stretches credulity. Israeli media since revealed that Musharraf placed his hand on Barak's shoulder as the latter praised the Pakistani leader for his role in the "war on terror". The following day, Barak had an hour-long meeting with Musharraf at the latter's invitation.

In all probability, Israel's close ally on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, the resourceful US Senator Joseph Lieberman, who visited

Pakistan as a state guest in early January, put together the Musharraf-Barak meeting.

Lieberman's native ingenuity is legion. Recently, the conservative Democratic Connecticut senator explained to the Jerusalem Post newspaper his unorthodox decision to endorse the Republican presidential candidate John McCain. By using a very orthodox metaphor, the one-time Democratic vice presidential nominee apparently explained: "The rabbis say in the Talmud that a lot of rabbinic law is to put a fence around the Torah so you don't get near to violating it."

Pakistan's threat perceptionsBoth Pakistan and Israel have reason to upgrade the level of their interaction. A good clue is available from Lieberman's itinerary in Islamabad, which included two unusual appointments for a visiting US senator. Lieberman had separate meetings with Pakistani army chief General Parvez Kiani and the director general of the Strategic Planning Division (SPD) , Lieutenant General (retired) Khalid Ahmad Kidwai.

Following these meetings on January 9, Lieberman paid handsome compliment to the SPD's professional capability in managing the command and control system for the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. "I am deeply impressed by the professionalism of the team headed by the general [Kidwai] to secure the nuclear assets of Pakistan," he said. The SPD went out of the way to give a detailed briefing to Lieberman.

The Pakistani intention was clear - Lieberman would transmit the impressions of his visit to Israel. Islamabad has been visibly edgy about the orchestrated media campaign in recent weeks that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal might fall into the hands of jihadi elements. Anyone could tell from a mile that the campaign stank. Pakistan was being threatened that it was about to be stripped of its crown jewels. It was hardly justified and was manifestly an attempt at blackmail.

First of all, as a BBC analyst put it in a commentary on this theater of the absurd, "Few believe Islamists could take power in Pakistan." Second, Pakistan's nuclear potential poses no more serious risks than the nuclear potentials of India or Israel or Russia or the US. Besides, Pakistan hasn't been tardy at all in constantly improving the security of its nuclear weapons. Finally, unless some superior foreign power succeeds in systematically degrading the Pakistani army, its capacity to be the custodian of the country's national security is never in doubt.

But Islamabad has felt the need to factor in what has come to be known as the "Osirak contingency". In their masterly work Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy, authors Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark have named top-level Indian sources, who previously served in key positions in the government, as admitting that Delhi closely worked with Israel on more than one occasion over plans to attack Pakistan's nuclear installations.

Of course, an apocalyptic conflagration of such a kind is simply unthinkable in today's circumstances when all three - Israel, Pakistan and India - are full nuclear powers, but like any military establishment would do, Rawalpindi, the site of the headquarters of the Pakistan armed forces, is bound to plan against a worst-case scenario. Furthermore, there is always a new angle in a future context - Israel could harbor misgivings that fissile materials out of Pakistan's nuclear facilities might find their way to Iran.

Evidently, Islamabad decided it was useful to level with Israel so that misconceptions did not arise. In diplomatic parlance, Musharraf's meeting with Barak has been a timely CBM (confidence-building measure).

India-Pakistan strategic parityBut that is only the tip of the iceberg. It underscores the geopolitical turbulence that is steadily enveloping the South Asian region. Much of the turbulence is being commonly attributed to the concerns of the international community over radical Islam and terrorism in the region or over the safety of Pakistan's nuclear weapons or of the specter of the Pakistani state withering away into anarchy under the sheer weight of its current political difficulties. But the factors underlying the volatility go deeper than that.

What is becoming apparent is that a series of maneuvers by regional powers is gradually building up in the coming period. Arguably, the heightened tensions around Pakistan are as much a symptom of these geopolitical maneuvers as of an intrinsic nature. Democracy deficit, political assassination, ruling elites, misgovernance, corruption, popular alienation, poverty and economic disparity, religious fanaticism - these are common to almost all countries of the South Asian region. Pakistan is certainly not an exception.

At the epicenter of the geopolitical turbulence in the region lies the rapidly expanding strategic partnership between the United States and India. The developing US-India strategic axis is triggering a large-scale realignment among regional powers, especially involving Pakistan.

As a leading commentator of the official Russian news agency put it recently, "Not without help from the great powers, India has gone so far ahead in the sphere of arms that it is pursuing its national interests from the Persian Gulf to the Malacca archipelago. Islamabad justifiably believes that the United States is ready to support India's claims to the status of a world power in exchange for its efforts to deter China and Iran ... [while] Pakistan still remains the main partner of the United States and Western Europe in the region's anti-terrorist coalition."

That a Moscow commentator should have made such a sharp, pithy observation becomes extraordinary by itself. He adds, "What should Pakistan do in this situation? ... Pakistan is using its potentialities to the utmost. In the past, its nuclear potential was a major deterrent, but today it is no longer playing this role. A contribution to the change was made by the United States - its nuclear romance with India is more than obvious."

Last Friday, Pakistan test-launched its medium-range Shaheen-1 rail-based solid fuel ballistic missile, which can deliver nuclear warheads at a distance of up to 700 kilometers. Indian experts say it is a modification of the Chinese M9 solid fuel tactical missile. They allege China may have helped Pakistan develop Shaheen-1 missiles.

This has been Pakistan's second test of tactical missiles in the past month and a half. On December 11, it test-launched its Babur cruise missile, a land-based liquid fuel missile with a range of up to 700km. Indeed, Pakistan is strictly observing the schedule of tests it has agreed with India within the framework of a bilateral agreement, and there has been no deviation in the type or range of missiles.

India is aware that Pakistan's nuclear weapons are aimed against it, but it doesn't make any ruckus about it, as that might needlessly draw international attention to the region as a "nuclear flashpoint", which it isn't. On the contrary, both India and Pakistan are equally busy developing their missile potentials and have in place bilateral agreement preventing the risk of accidents with nuclear weapons.

Curiously, at times it even seems there is an almost tacit bilateral commitment between the two countries to the principle of parallel testing. But, having said that, there is no doubt that India is pulling incrementally ahead of Pakistan in regard of the missile systems' characteristics.

US-India military tiesIndia is embarking on a massive armament program in cooperation with the US. The Times of India newspaper reported on Tuesday, "After joint combat exercises to develop 'interoperability', the Indo-US military tango is now firmly waltzing into the arms purchase arena as well." India has just concluded a billion-dollar deal for the purchase of six C-130J Super Hercules aircraft from the US. Negotiations are reportedly in an advanced stage with Boeing company for a US$2 billion deal for the purchase of eight P-8i long-range maritime reconnaissance aircraft with anti-submarine warfare capabilities.

On the horizon, as the Indian daily put it, "The US is obviously desperate to grab a big piece of action" out of India's projected $30 billion worth arms purchases in the 2007-2012 period. Actually, there is no need for Washington to be so "desperate". Delhi is more than willing to play its designated role as a pivotal country in the US's global strategy.

It has scheduled "at least five joint combat exercises" with the US for 2008. For the first time, India will also be jointly exercising with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is scheduled to visit India on February 25-26. The American ambassador in India publicly reaffirmed on Monday that there is a "definite desire" in Washington to conclude the nuclear cooperation agreement with India on George W Bush's watch.

It is symptomatic of the strategic equations shaping up in the region that Gates will be skipping Pakistan during his tour of the region. Yet, it was only last week that Gates devoted an entire press

Aerial warfare in 1965 India Pakistan WarFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, searchOn September 1, 1965, the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 war erupted between the Republic of India and Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The war saw the Indian Air Force and the Pakistani Air Force engaged in full scale combat for the first time since independence. Though the two forces had previously faced off in the First Kashmir War during the late 1940s, that engagement was limited in scale compared to the 1965 conflict.

[edit] The Main BattleThe Indian Air Force's Number 45 squadron quickly responded to the urgent call for air strikes against the Pakistani army and 4 IAF Vampire FB Mk 52s were successful in slowing the Pakistani invasion,however the PAF sent 2 F-86 Sabres armed with air to air missiles to the battlefield & in the ensuing dogfight, the outdated Vampires of Indian Air Force did not match with the superior F 86 sabres of PAF, with losses; one Vampire been shot down by ground fire and three Vampires shot down by PAF F-86 Sabres. The Vampires were followed in quick succession by Mysteres of Nos 3 and 31 Squadron from Pathankot.-86 Sabres]].

The appearance of the Sabres necessiated a move by the IAF to send the Folland Gnat fighters to the forward base of Pathankot. The move succeeded - within two days the IAF shot down one aircraft. Sqn Ldr Trevor J. Keelor of No. 23 Squadron shot down a F-86 Sabre on September 3, marking the first air combat victory to the IAF since WW2.

On September 6, the Indian Army crossed the border at Lahore to relieve pressure off the Chamb Jaurian sector. On the evening of the same day, the PAF responded with attacks on Indian airfields at Pathankot and Halwara. The attack on Pathankot was successful and the IAF lost nearly 12 aircraft on the ground. The attack on Halwara was unsuccessful; Two of the attacking raiders was shot down for the loss of two Indian Hunters. Both the Pakistani pilots were killed in the action one of them was SL Sarfaraz Rafiqui who had shot down 2 Vampires on 1st september while the other was FL Yunus Ahmed. Both the Indian Pilots Pingle & Gandhi survived as they ejected near their base.

The next day, September 7, the IAF mounted over 33 sorties against the hevily guarded PAF airfield complex at [[Sargodha]. The IAF lost two Mysteres and three Hunters due to the defence mounted by the Pakistan Air Force's local squadrons but losses on ground for the PAF were high to. One of the crippled Mysteres got involved in an air combat with an F-104 Starfighter & shot down, before he fell for damages caused by the previous attack with the same Starfighter. The pilot, Sqn Ldr Ajjamada Boppaya Devayya, was awarded the Maha Vir Chakra 23 years later after his feat was revealed by a author appointed by PAF to write their story on 1965 war.

September 7 also marked the day when the PAF attacked IAF airfields in the Eastern Sector. The raid on Kalaikunda was successful and the IAF lost 10 aircraft in two raids. One Indian pilot Flt Lt A T Cooke engaged four Sabres singlehandedly & shot down one & made another a write off. Though such a feat did not really help the IAF which suffered badly as a result of the raid.

The war lessened in intensity after September 8th and there were occasional clashes between the IAF and the PAF. Both Air forces now changed their doctrine from air interdictions to ground attack & concentrated their efforts on knocking out soft skin targets & supply lines like wagons carrying ammunitions & armoured vehicles. During the conflict IAF Canberras raided a few of the Pakistani bases. On september-10, one Mystere was downed by Ack Ack Fire in Pakistan, but the pilot managed to make it back to Friendly lines.

September 13th, one PAF F-86 Sabre was downed by Ack Ack fire, when he attacked Gurdaspur Railway Yard. The pilot ejected but was declared dead when he reached ground, however 1 Gnat was shot down by F-86 Sabre of PAF, the pilot ejected on home ground. On September 14, Canberras undertook the deepest strike in the war on the Pakistani bases of Peshawar and Kohat.However rather than bombing the Peshawer airstrip IAF bombers mistook the mall road in Peshawer as the runway & Peshawer buidling due to night time poor visibility and showered it with all they had. The PAF admits, the IAF had came very close to annihalating it's entire B-57 bombers. The Canberra's on their return mission was intercepted by F-104 of PAF, but they managed to evade the starfighter & returned home safely. One F-86 was shot down by Gnat, when they tried to engage Canberras who were coming back after an attack. The PAF pilot was killed before he could eject. One PAF B-57 was shot down by Ack Ack Fire over Adampur, both the pilots ejected & remained POW's. On September-15, C-130's of PAF were used as Bomber planes instead of transport, apart for it's innovation, it did not achieve the desired results. September-16: One Gnat & Sabre was shot down over Halwara, the PAF pilot ejected & turned POW, while the IAF pilot was killed in the encounter. On September 18th 1 Sabre was shot down by Gnat, over Amritsar, however the remaining Sabres who were returning home, after aborting the raid, shot down a Civilian aircraft carrying the then Gujarat CM & his family. On September-19, 1 Gnat & 2 Sabre's were downed over Chawinda. On September 20 2 Hunters & 1 sabre were shot down over Kasur Pakistan, which was the last Gnat Kill of 1965 war. At one stage the IAF was operating 200 air missions simultaneously. IAF Folland Gnat's of Nos 9 and 23 squadrons played a significant role in major air battles.

On Sept 21st, IAF Canberras carried out a daring daylight strike into Pakistan at the radar complex in Badin, the raid was successfull as the entire radar complex was knocked out. On the same day a PAF F-104 intercepted a Canberra bomber on its way back from Sargodha and shot it down, while One Hunter Pilot who was the Son of Chief of the Indian Army was shot down by Ack Ack fire, he ejected & was taken POW. The Ceasefire was declared on the night of September 22.

KANSAS CITY: A sign outside the Shawnee Community Center states a clear goal: "A World Without Hunger." But inside, that goal is getting harder to Global stimulus package2008: Year of financial crisisRecession hits IT companiesIndia battles credit crisisCredit crisis strikes EuropeFinancial turmoil grips Europereach.

Senior citizens, young parents and middle-aged working poor were among those lining up at the suburban center this week, quietly collecting handouts of pasta, canned vegetables, peanut butter and other staples to stave off hunger.

"We are seeing more people this Christmas than last Christmas for sure," said Shawnee Community Center volunteer Verta Morris. "A lot of people are hungry."

Long lines are common sights these days at food pantries across recession-hit America.

US food banks have reported a 30 per cent rise in requests for emergency food assistance, according to a report issued last week by Feeding America, which supports 63,000 agencies and is the nation's largest hunger relief organization.

The group said the situation is expected to grow worse in 2009 amid rising unemployment, and a consortium of charity groups are calling on Washington for more federal assistance. U.S. employers cut 533,000 jobs in November alone, the highest monthly number in 34 years.

Food assistance groups said many families who show up at their doors were recently making it on their own. But two years of rising food and energy costs ate into what little safety net those families had. Now, as jobs losses rise, many who were making ends meet can no longer do so.

Also Read ? Russia, China warn of dire economic straits in 2009 ? US consumer spending dips less than forecast ? World economy to slow further on credit crisis: BOJ's Kamezaki

"People have just been stretched to the breaking point. They have to turn to someone for help," said Karen Siebert, spokeswoman for Harvesters Community Food Network in Kansas City, which provides food for 420 food pantries in a 13-county area and has seen demand jumped 50 percent this year.

Debbie and Victor Turner, both 48, were among many waiting their turn on Monday in Shawnee for food supplies, which this week included a frozen turkey as a holiday treat.

Victor once worked in construction but he and his wife now clean houses for $65 to $100 a house. They collect and sell scrap metal to cover their rent and care for three grandchildren.

"Without this, we could be near starvation," Debbie said.

In big cities and small towns, the story is the same.

At St. Mary's Food Bank in Phoenix, about 180,000 meals a day are being distributed ahead of the Christmas holiday.

BANGALORE: The moon mineralogy mapper (M3), a scientific instrument of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) onboard India's first lunar mission Chandrayaan-1, found iron-bearing minerals on the lunar surface, the US space agency said on Thursday.

"The mapper spectrometer has beamed images of the Orientale Basin region of the moon, indicating abundance of iron-bearing minerals such as pyroxene. Using different wavelengths of light, the instrument has also revealed for the first time changes in rock and mineral composition," M3 principal investigator Carle Pieters said in a statement hosted on NASA website.

Data from the 7-kg mapper provides space scientists first opportunity to examine lunar mineralogy at high spatial and spectral resolution.

The Orientale Basin is located on the moon's western limb. M3 captured the data last week when Chandrayaan was orbiting the moon at an altitude of 100 km.

"The imaging spectrometer provides us with compositional information across the moon that we have never had access to before. Our ability to identify and map the composition of the surface in geologic context provides a new level of detail needed to explore and understand the earth's nearest celestial neighbour," affirmed Pieters, who teaches at Brown University in Rhode Island.

The mapper was selected as a mission of opportunity through the NASA discovery programme. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory designed and built the instrument at Pasadena in California.

"M3 will also help in characterising and mapping lunar minerals for knowing the moon's early geological evolution. Its compositional maps will improve our understanding of the early evolution of a differentiated planetary body and provide a high-resolution assessment of lunar resources," Chandrayaan project director M Annadurai averred.

M3 is one of the 10 instruments onboard the unmanned Chandrayaan, conducting experiments while the spacecraft orbits over the moon next two years.

Five instruments were indigenously built by the state-run Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), while the remaining six payloads are of foreign origin, including three from the European Space Agency, two from NASA and one from Bulgaria.

After traversing 384,000 km through the deep space for 18 days, the spacecraft entered the lunar orbit Nov 8 and its moon impact probe was lowered on the moon's surface Nov 14.

Obama's Christmas delight; enjoys highest approval ratingWASHINGTON: Its surely is merry Christmas for Barack Obama with Santa raining goodies, this time in the form of an all time high rating of 82 per cent Americans approving his handling of presidential transition.

Obama's approval is higher than George W Bush's 65 per cent approval rating during his transition eight years ago with Bill Clinton at 67 percent in 1992.

Less than a month to go before Obama assumes office in the teeth of a looming recession, a CNN Opinion Research Poll released yesterday shows that more than eight in 10 or 82 per cent of the respondents approve of the way he is handling his presidential transition.

That approval is up 3 percentage points from when CNN asked the same question at the beginning of December. Fifteen per cent of those surveyed disapprove of the way the president-elect is handling his transition, down 3 points from the last poll, the CNN said.

"Barack Obama is having a better honeymoon with the American public than any incoming president in the past three decades. He's putting up better numbers, usually by double digits, than Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or either George Bush on every item traditionally measured in transition polls," Keating Holland, CNN's polling director, said.

The findings suggest that 56 per cent of those questioned term Obama's Cabinet nominees as outstanding or above average.

Around 32 per cent said they feel the picks have been average while 11 per cent criticised his choices as below average or poor.

"Obama walks in with nearly twice the support on the economy that President-elect Clinton had in January 1993, and he beats Ronald Reagan as well," Holland adds.

The poll was conducted on Friday through Sunday, with 1,013 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey's sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Boom to gloom: Indian economy saw it all in 200825 Dec 2008, 1243 hrs IST, IANS

No other year in recent times saw such wild mood swings in the Indian economy than 2008, which started on a strong note but ended on a weak wicket in the wake of a general global slowdown and severe recession in some of the richest countries like the US and Japan.

From economic expansion to performance of equity markets, and from export growth to industrial production, all indicators had the same story to tell: The year had started with a strong economic performance, but the momentum was lost as the months passed, as India faced the ripple effects of the gloom in the global economy.

The indicator that captured the trend best was the 30-share sensitive index (Sensex) of the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), often seen as a barometer not only for investor mood but also the overall performance of the Indian economy and its corporate sector.

On Jan 10 this year, the Sensex was ruling at an all-time intra-day high of 21,206.77 points. But as the year is drawing to a close, it is languishing at around the 9,000-point mark - a fall of over 50 percent in the year. Last year, the index had gained nearly 50 percent.

The Sensex apart, exports fell in October for the first time in seven years. Indirect tax mop up was down eight percent in October. Industrial production, which was among the main drivers of the economy, fell 0.4 percent. The rupee fell below 50 to a dollar in November to an all-time low. And, as per the government's own admission, some 65,000 jobs were lost between August and October.

The high cost of crude oil, which jumped from under $40 per barrel a year ago to nearly $150 per barrel in August, added to the country's woes in terms of higher import bill and accentuated the losses of state-run fuel retailers, which had to bear the burden of having to sell hydrocarbon products below cost.

As a result, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, which at the beginning of the year said the Indian economy would continue to grow at over nine percent this fiscal, had to tone down its target sharply, hoping to achieve an overall increase of 7-7.5 percent in gross domestic product (GDP).

"Two key sectors, agriculture and industry, were unable to maintain the pace due to the global economic slowdown. This will have a serious effect on our overall growth," said Dalip Kumar, head of projects at the National Council of Applied Economics Research, an economic think-tank.

The only notable saving grace was on the price front, where the annual rate of inflation fell from a 16-year high of 12.63 percent for the week ended Aug 9 to 6.84 percent for the week ended Dec 6 - but not without taking a toll on industrial growth on account of the tight monetary policy of the central bank during the months before.

"Inflation is not a concern any more. If the Indian government does not think in terms of long- term measures to contain the slowdown, the medium-term growth projection of 8-9 percent will be difficult to achieve," said Biswa N. Bhattacharyay, Tokyo-based special adviser with the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

As India Inc. cried hoarse, saying the credit squeeze due to the policies of the central bank was affecting its day-to-day business, policymakers appeared to be in a denial mode initially, with the prime minister maintaining that India remained largely insulated from the goings-on in the world economy.

X'mas, New Year bashes low-key in Mumbai hotels; bookings dip

25 Dec 2008, 1031 hrs IST, PTIMUMBAI: Hotels in the metropolis are seeing a slump in bookings for this holiday season compared to Christmas and New Year last year due to negative sentiment prevailing in backdrop of the economic meltdown and the terror attacks on Taj and Trident here.

"There has been a 30-40 per cent dip in bookings in Mumbai hotels this time because of the terror attacks. Big hotels have suffered more as they have more rooms to fill," Hotels and Restaurants Association, Western India, Secretary General S M Korde told PTI.

Many luxury establishments in the financial capital as well as in Goa, famous for its New Year bashes, witnessed shrinking occupancy rates following the 60-hour long terror siege on the iconic Taj and Trident hotels on November 26.

Ratan Tata-owned Taj and Oberoi Group-run Trident reopened their respective tower wings on December 21 after three weeks of restoration works.

Taj had an occupancy rate of 56 per cent, with 150 of the 268 rooms being checked into on the first day, while the 550-room Trident registered an occupancy of over 16 per cent.

conference, lasting over an hour, to "the emergence of this fairly considerable security challenge" in Pakistan, while offering, "We [US ] remain ready, willing and capable to assist the Pakistanis and to partner with them, to provide additional training, to conduct joint operations, should they desire to do so."

From Islamabad's perspective, the "de-hyphenated" policy on the part of the US toward Pakistan and India has virtually come to mean that Washington is focusing on the Pakistani military role as an efficient, well-trained and well-equipped border militia in the tribal tracts with Afghanistan. On top of it, despite robust refusal by Islamabad, Washington is pressing hard for the deployment of US troops on Pakistani soil and for beefing up the American intelligence presence within Pakistan.

On any single day, Pakistani media reflect a bitter sense of betrayal. Ahmed Quraishi, a top TV commentator, wrote recently in The News: "After 9/11, Pakistan's crucial assistance helped the United States secure a huge American footprint in Central Asia. That was a dream come true for American strategic planners. In return, Pakistan got nothing but instability, derision and broken promises. A feasible Pakistan-American cooperation in the region has to work both ways, securing the interests of both parties. Yet it never did after 9/11 despite every reason it should have."

In this situation, we may expect Pakistan will begin to seek support in its relations with India from other countries with modern weapons, apart from China or the US. It may happen that Pakistan may turn to Russia for this purpose. In fact, a strong likelihood is that Pakistan-Russia relations may be getting ready for an historic makeover. The desperate US efforts to kiss and make up with Uzbekistan suggest that Washington apprehends a Russian thrust toward Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Moscow will also be watching with uneasiness that India in its zest to consolidate an elevated status in the US's regional policy has shown readiness to calibrate its traditional policies with regard to Russia and Central Asia.

As India gives formal shape to its contacts with NATO and openly participates in the US's missile defense program, the trajectory of US-India strategic cooperation will begin to impact on Russian interests, unless, of course, Delhi takes corrective measures, for which, however, political will becomes necessary. Washington is, in any case, resolute in steering its strategic cooperation with India precisely in such a direction that it leads to an all-round rollback of Russian influence in South Asia.

All this adds up to mean that the US-India strategic partnership need not be the end of the world for Pakistan. An altogether new strategic equation may develop in the region between Russia, China and Pakistan. With the regional security environment in such a flux, Musharraf's message to Barak would have been direct: Pakistan is in no way threatening Israel's security directly or in league with a third country, and Pakistan expects Israel to reciprocate. Coming from one soldier-turned-politician to another, that is not too much to ask. Barak would have understood.

M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for over 29 years, with postings including India's ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and to Turkey (1998-2001).

Aerial warfare in 1965 India Pakistan WarFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, searchOn September 1, 1965, the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 war erupted between the Republic of India and Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The war saw the Indian Air Force and the Pakistani Air Force engaged in full scale combat for the first time since independence. Though the two forces had previously faced off in the First Kashmir War during the late 1940s, that engagement was limited in scale compared to the 1965 conflict.

[edit] The Main BattleThe Indian Air Force's Number 45 squadron quickly responded to the urgent call for air strikes against the Pakistani army and 4 IAF Vampire FB Mk 52s were successful in slowing the Pakistani invasion,however the PAF sent 2 F-86 Sabres armed with air to air missiles to the battlefield & in the ensuing dogfight, the outdated Vampires of Indian Air Force did not match with the superior F 86 sabres of PAF, with losses; one Vampire been shot down by ground fire and three Vampires shot down by PAF F-86 Sabres. The Vampires were followed in quick succession by Mysteres of Nos 3 and 31 Squadron from Pathankot.-86 Sabres]].

The appearance of the Sabres necessiated a move by the IAF to send the Folland Gnat fighters to the forward base of Pathankot. The move succeeded - within two days the IAF shot down one aircraft. Sqn Ldr Trevor J. Keelor of No. 23 Squadron shot down a F-86 Sabre on September 3, marking the first air combat victory to the IAF since WW2.

On September 6, the Indian Army crossed the border at Lahore to relieve pressure off the Chamb Jaurian sector. On the evening of the same day, the PAF responded with attacks on Indian airfields at Pathankot and Halwara. The attack on Pathankot was successful and the IAF lost nearly 12 aircraft on the ground. The attack on Halwara was unsuccessful; Two of the attacking raiders was shot down for the loss of two Indian Hunters. Both the Pakistani pilots were killed in the action one of them was SL Sarfaraz Rafiqui who had shot down 2 Vampires on 1st september while the other was FL Yunus Ahmed. Both the Indian Pilots Pingle & Gandhi survived as they ejected near their base.

The next day, September 7, the IAF mounted over 33 sorties against the hevily guarded PAF airfield complex at [[Sargodha]. The IAF lost two Mysteres and three Hunters due to the defence mounted by the Pakistan Air Force's local squadrons but losses on ground for the PAF were high to. One of the crippled Mysteres got involved in an air combat with an F-104 Starfighter & shot down, before he fell for damages caused by the previous attack with the same Starfighter. The pilot, Sqn Ldr Ajjamada Boppaya Devayya, was awarded the Maha Vir Chakra 23 years later after his feat was revealed by a author appointed by PAF to write their story on 1965 war.

September 7 also marked the day when the PAF attacked IAF airfields in the Eastern Sector. The raid on Kalaikunda was successful and the IAF lost 10 aircraft in two raids. One Indian pilot Flt Lt A T Cooke engaged four Sabres singlehandedly & shot down one & made another a write off. Though such a feat did not really help the IAF which suffered badly as a result of the raid.

The war lessened in intensity after September 8th and there were occasional clashes between the IAF and the PAF. Both Air forces now changed their doctrine from air interdictions to ground attack & concentrated their efforts on knocking out soft skin targets & supply lines like wagons carrying ammunitions & armoured vehicles. During the conflict IAF Canberras raided a few of the Pakistani bases. On september-10, one Mystere was downed by Ack Ack Fire in Pakistan, but the pilot managed to make it back to Friendly lines.

September 13th, one PAF F-86 Sabre was downed by Ack Ack fire, when he attacked Gurdaspur Railway Yard. The pilot ejected but was declared dead when he reached ground, however 1 Gnat was shot down by F-86 Sabre of PAF, the pilot ejected on home ground. On September 14, Canberras undertook the deepest strike in the war on the Pakistani bases of Peshawar and Kohat.However rather than bombing the Peshawer airstrip IAF bombers mistook the mall road in Peshawer as the runway & Peshawer buidling due to night time poor visibility and showered it with all they had. The PAF admits, the IAF had came very close to annihalating it's entire B-57 bombers. The Canberra's on their return mission was intercepted by F-104 of PAF, but they managed to evade the starfighter & returned home safely. One F-86 was shot down by Gnat, when they tried to engage Canberras who were coming back after an attack. The PAF pilot was killed before he could eject. One PAF B-57 was shot down by Ack Ack Fire over Adampur, both the pilots ejected & remained POW's. On September-15, C-130's of PAF were used as Bomber planes instead of transport, apart for it's innovation, it did not achieve the desired results. September-16: One Gnat & Sabre was shot down over Halwara, the PAF pilot ejected & turned POW, while the IAF pilot was killed in the encounter. On September 18th 1 Sabre was shot down by Gnat, over Amritsar, however the remaining Sabres who were returning home, after aborting the raid, shot down a Civilian aircraft carrying the then Gujarat CM & his family. On September-19, 1 Gnat & 2 Sabre's were downed over Chawinda. On September 20 2 Hunters & 1 sabre were shot down over Kasur Pakistan, which was the last Gnat Kill of 1965 war. At one stage the IAF was operating 200 air missions simultaneously. IAF Folland Gnat's of Nos 9 and 23 squadrons played a significant role in major air battles.

On Sept 21st, IAF Canberras carried out a daring daylight strike into Pakistan at the radar complex in Badin, the raid was successfull as the entire radar complex was knocked out. On the same day a PAF F-104 intercepted a Canberra bomber on its way back from Sargodha and shot it down, while One Hunter Pilot who was the Son of Chief of the Indian Army was shot down by Ack Ack fire, he ejected & was taken POW. The Ceasefire was declared on the night of September 22.

KANSAS CITY: A sign outside the Shawnee Community Center states a clear goal: "A World Without Hunger." But inside, that goal is getting harder to Global stimulus package2008: Year of financial crisisRecession hits IT companiesIndia battles credit crisisCredit crisis strikes EuropeFinancial turmoil grips Europereach.

Senior citizens, young parents and middle-aged working poor were among those lining up at the suburban center this week, quietly collecting handouts of pasta, canned vegetables, peanut butter and other staples to stave off hunger.

"We are seeing more people this Christmas than last Christmas for sure," said Shawnee Community Center volunteer Verta Morris. "A lot of people are hungry."

Long lines are common sights these days at food pantries across recession-hit America.

US food banks have reported a 30 per cent rise in requests for emergency food assistance, according to a report issued last week by Feeding America, which supports 63,000 agencies and is the nation's largest hunger relief organization.

The group said the situation is expected to grow worse in 2009 amid rising unemployment, and a consortium of charity groups are calling on Washington for more federal assistance. U.S. employers cut 533,000 jobs in November alone, the highest monthly number in 34 years.

Food assistance groups said many families who show up at their doors were recently making it on their own. But two years of rising food and energy costs ate into what little safety net those families had. Now, as jobs losses rise, many who were making ends meet can no longer do so.

Also Read ? Russia, China warn of dire economic straits in 2009 ? US consumer spending dips less than forecast ? World economy to slow further on credit crisis: BOJ's Kamezaki

"People have just been stretched to the breaking point. They have to turn to someone for help," said Karen Siebert, spokeswoman for Harvesters Community Food Network in Kansas City, which provides food for 420 food pantries in a 13-county area and has seen demand jumped 50 percent this year.

Debbie and Victor Turner, both 48, were among many waiting their turn on Monday in Shawnee for food supplies, which this week included a frozen turkey as a holiday treat.

Victor once worked in construction but he and his wife now clean houses for $65 to $100 a house. They collect and sell scrap metal to cover their rent and care for three grandchildren.

"Without this, we could be near starvation," Debbie said.

In big cities and small towns, the story is the same.

At St. Mary's Food Bank in Phoenix, about 180,000 meals a day are being distributed ahead of the Christmas holiday.

BANGALORE: The moon mineralogy mapper (M3), a scientific instrument of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) onboard India's first lunar mission Chandrayaan-1, found iron-bearing minerals on the lunar surface, the US space agency said on Thursday.

"The mapper spectrometer has beamed images of the Orientale Basin region of the moon, indicating abundance of iron-bearing minerals such as pyroxene. Using different wavelengths of light, the instrument has also revealed for the first time changes in rock and mineral composition," M3 principal investigator Carle Pieters said in a statement hosted on NASA website.

Data from the 7-kg mapper provides space scientists first opportunity to examine lunar mineralogy at high spatial and spectral resolution.

The Orientale Basin is located on the moon's western limb. M3 captured the data last week when Chandrayaan was orbiting the moon at an altitude of 100 km.

"The imaging spectrometer provides us with compositional information across the moon that we have never had access to before. Our ability to identify and map the composition of the surface in geologic context provides a new level of detail needed to explore and understand the earth's nearest celestial neighbour," affirmed Pieters, who teaches at Brown University in Rhode Island.

The mapper was selected as a mission of opportunity through the NASA discovery programme. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory designed and built the instrument at Pasadena in California.

"M3 will also help in characterising and mapping lunar minerals for knowing the moon's early geological evolution. Its compositional maps will improve our understanding of the early evolution of a differentiated planetary body and provide a high-resolution assessment of lunar resources," Chandrayaan project director M Annadurai averred.

M3 is one of the 10 instruments onboard the unmanned Chandrayaan, conducting experiments while the spacecraft orbits over the moon next two years.

Five instruments were indigenously built by the state-run Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), while the remaining six payloads are of foreign origin, including three from the European Space Agency, two from NASA and one from Bulgaria.

After traversing 384,000 km through the deep space for 18 days, the spacecraft entered the lunar orbit Nov 8 and its moon impact probe was lowered on the moon's surface Nov 14.

Obama's Christmas delight; enjoys highest approval ratingWASHINGTON: Its surely is merry Christmas for Barack Obama with Santa raining goodies, this time in the form of an all time high rating of 82 per cent Americans approving his handling of presidential transition.

Obama's approval is higher than George W Bush's 65 per cent approval rating during his transition eight years ago with Bill Clinton at 67 percent in 1992.

Less than a month to go before Obama assumes office in the teeth of a looming recession, a CNN Opinion Research Poll released yesterday shows that more than eight in 10 or 82 per cent of the respondents approve of the way he is handling his presidential transition.

That approval is up 3 percentage points from when CNN asked the same question at the beginning of December. Fifteen per cent of those surveyed disapprove of the way the president-elect is handling his transition, down 3 points from the last poll, the CNN said.

"Barack Obama is having a better honeymoon with the American public than any incoming president in the past three decades. He's putting up better numbers, usually by double digits, than Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or either George Bush on every item traditionally measured in transition polls," Keating Holland, CNN's polling director, said.

The findings suggest that 56 per cent of those questioned term Obama's Cabinet nominees as outstanding or above average.

Around 32 per cent said they feel the picks have been average while 11 per cent criticised his choices as below average or poor.

"Obama walks in with nearly twice the support on the economy that President-elect Clinton had in January 1993, and he beats Ronald Reagan as well," Holland adds.

The poll was conducted on Friday through Sunday, with 1,013 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey's sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Boom to gloom: Indian economy saw it all in 200825 Dec 2008, 1243 hrs IST, IANS

No other year in recent times saw such wild mood swings in the Indian economy than 2008, which started on a strong note but ended on a weak wicket in the wake of a general global slowdown and severe recession in some of the richest countries like the US and Japan.

From economic expansion to performance of equity markets, and from export growth to industrial production, all indicators had the same story to tell: The year had started with a strong economic performance, but the momentum was lost as the months passed, as India faced the ripple effects of the gloom in the global economy.

The indicator that captured the trend best was the 30-share sensitive index (Sensex) of the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), often seen as a barometer not only for investor mood but also the overall performance of the Indian economy and its corporate sector.

On Jan 10 this year, the Sensex was ruling at an all-time intra-day high of 21,206.77 points. But as the year is drawing to a close, it is languishing at around the 9,000-point mark - a fall of over 50 percent in the year. Last year, the index had gained nearly 50 percent.

The Sensex apart, exports fell in October for the first time in seven years. Indirect tax mop up was down eight percent in October. Industrial production, which was among the main drivers of the economy, fell 0.4 percent. The rupee fell below 50 to a dollar in November to an all-time low. And, as per the government's own admission, some 65,000 jobs were lost between August and October.

The high cost of crude oil, which jumped from under $40 per barrel a year ago to nearly $150 per barrel in August, added to the country's woes in terms of higher import bill and accentuated the losses of state-run fuel retailers, which had to bear the burden of having to sell hydrocarbon products below cost.

As a result, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, which at the beginning of the year said the Indian economy would continue to grow at over nine percent this fiscal, had to tone down its target sharply, hoping to achieve an overall increase of 7-7.5 percent in gross domestic product (GDP).

"Two key sectors, agriculture and industry, were unable to maintain the pace due to the global economic slowdown. This will have a serious effect on our overall growth," said Dalip Kumar, head of projects at the National Council of Applied Economics Research, an economic think-tank.

The only notable saving grace was on the price front, where the annual rate of inflation fell from a 16-year high of 12.63 percent for the week ended Aug 9 to 6.84 percent for the week ended Dec 6 - but not without taking a toll on industrial growth on account of the tight monetary policy of the central bank during the months before.

"Inflation is not a concern any more. If the Indian government does not think in terms of long- term measures to contain the slowdown, the medium-term growth projection of 8-9 percent will be difficult to achieve," said Biswa N. Bhattacharyay, Tokyo-based special adviser with the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

As India Inc. cried hoarse, saying the credit squeeze due to the policies of the central bank was affecting its day-to-day business, policymakers appeared to be in a denial mode initially, with the prime minister maintaining that India remained largely insulated from the goings-on in the world economy.

X'mas, New Year bashes low-key in Mumbai hotels; bookings dip

25 Dec 2008, 1031 hrs IST, PTIMUMBAI: Hotels in the metropolis are seeing a slump in bookings for this holiday season compared to Christmas and New Year last year due to negative sentiment prevailing in backdrop of the economic meltdown and the terror attacks on Taj and Trident here.

"There has been a 30-40 per cent dip in bookings in Mumbai hotels this time because of the terror attacks. Big hotels have suffered more as they have more rooms to fill," Hotels and Restaurants Association, Western India, Secretary General S M Korde told PTI.

Many luxury establishments in the financial capital as well as in Goa, famous for its New Year bashes, witnessed shrinking occupancy rates following the 60-hour long terror siege on the iconic Taj and Trident hotels on November 26.

Ratan Tata-owned Taj and Oberoi Group-run Trident reopened their respective tower wings on December 21 after three weeks of restoration works.

Taj had an occupancy rate of 56 per cent, with 150 of the 268 rooms being checked into on the first day, while the 550-room Trident registered an occupancy of over 16 per cent.

The sea-facing hotel, like most of its peers, is going to keep Christmas and New Year celebrations low-key this time.

"We have stopped everything this time, firstly because of the tragic incidents (attacks) and also there is hardly any crowd who feels like partying," Anand Bhatt, General Manager, Ritz Hotel, located at Church gate, said.